We'll Be Force-Fed Ads on Our Deathbeds
someone hijacked my doctor's phone line with an AI ad network
Hey you,
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Alright, story time.
Here is a thing that happened to me in America recently: I called my doctor after hours, and I never got through.
What I got instead was six minutes of automated voices, fake humans with names like “Jessica” and “Emma,” pitching me medical alert devices, pest control, and car insurance, in that order, with no exit and no mention of my doctor anywhere. “There was no way out of the sales funnel,” I wrote on Threads right after it happened. “This country is already dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”
I want to tell you the full story, because it’s absurd and satirical by nature, but also deeply disappointing and I think you need to hear it (or scroll a couple inches and watch the real-time video!).
“This call may be recorded for quality assurance. We have a special promotion today for select callers. If you are over 50, please press one now. If not, press pound.”
I didn’t press anything. I just started talking.
“What? Why?”
And it looped. So eventually you have to choose, there’s no other way out. I pressed #.
“Hello, and congratulations, just for calling today.”
I should not be congratulated. I pressed a button while trying to reach my doctor.
What followed was five more minutes of this: the free medical alert device pitch, then “Jessica,” a fake AI voice who opened with “can you hear me okay?“ (a tactic that’s been flagged as a way to get you to say yes on a recorded line, tricking you into consent). When I told her she was fake and to stop talking, she just kept selling. Then pest control. Then car insurance. Then “Emma,” another fake AI exit handler, who pretended to route my call, gave me a callback number, then gave me a different one, and then told me to hang up. No mention of my doctor. No option to leave a message. Six fake characters in six minutes, and not one of them was there to help me.
I grabbed a second iPhone and documented the whole thing as it was happening (because I’m that guy). There’s nothing to look at here, but if you go on this full journey, you are going to want to yell. I did, in real time, alone in my house.
As aggravating as this is on its own, it lives in an even darker context.
Two visits to that same doctor’s office this past month, I’ve been sitting in the exam room alone waiting the way you do–it’s that specific medical waiting where you’re just alone in a cold room until someone comes to poke you–and the whole time giant displays on the wall are trying to sell you drugs. A rotating, seizure-inducing screen that you stare at while you wait for the human to arrive and look at their own screen while they’re with you. It’s great. We’re crushing it, America.
So when I called after hours and got an AI-powered ad network instead of an answering service, I wasn’t surprised so much as I was reminded, with fresh rage, of exactly where we are. And yes, I’m tired of all the winning.
Every moment of downtime in the medical system, every gap, every waiting room, every after-hours line, has been looked at by someone and identified as an opportunity. Someone qualified me by age. Someone built the six-layer transfer structure. Someone is collecting the per-call fee. The doctor doesn’t know it’s happening and the patient can’t get out.
I called the office the next morning. The receptionist had no idea what I was talking about. What likely happened is a documented form of telecom fraud, the after-hours call forwarding got hijacked and rerouted to an ad network without anyone’s consent.
No one calls a doctor after hours to be sold car insurance. And yet someone looked at that phone line, the one that exists specifically so a sick person can reach their doctor, and decided it was just another addressable market, that a desperate person’s phone call was ad inventory. That is malicious.
“Jessica” and “Emma” aren’t accidents. They are AI tools someone chose to deploy here, on this line, because the technology made it cheap enough to be worth doing. That’s the accelerant. It doesn’t require a villain twirling a mustache to pull this off anymore, just people making decisions about what to automate and where to point it, who decided that your fear and your need were a fine place to make some money.
That’s how a country dies, how a society dies. And the kicker? They’re going to force-feed us ads on our deathbeds as we try to reach our doctors. And after we die, Meta will keep our ghosts working so they can sell more ads.
I don’t want to leave you in a puddle of despair so I do have one small thing we can all do about this. My friend Ron J. Williams built something worth putting on your phone right now. His father got scammed out of his entire retirement through WhatsApp. Ron couldn't recover the money. So he built ScamHERO. You take a screenshot of a weird text, send it to the app, and it comes back with a verdict: real or scam, what to do, who to call, how to report it. I've been using it for months. Put it on your phone. Put it on your parents' phone. Put it on your in-laws' phone. We protect each other.
I’d bet some money I’m not the only one with a story like this. Sound off in the comments: what have you all been experiencing out there?
-Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
If I had a dollar for every time that I've dialed the doctor for a health related matter only to realize that all I really needed was to save some money on car insurance...I'd have no dollars. ZERO dollars.
Oh this one is depressing. Lordt.