RUSH: Okay, folks, let’s do it. Let’s go back to the Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites. Dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut. Yep, let’s do a homeless update. Let’s do it the way we used to do it.
(playing of song Ain’t Got No Home)
It’s Clarence “Frogman” Henry from New Orleans. Our official homeless update. Here comes verse two.
(continued playing of song)
And once again Clarence “Frogman” Henry singing as a woman, Ain’t Got No Home. Third verse coming. He does a frog.
(continued playing of song)
Clarence “Frogman” Henry doing three parts.
(continued playing of song)
That was big for the Frogman in 1956, and is our official homeless update theme to this day here on the EIB Network. Frogman once said after gleefully learning that we had chosen his song, he said, “Finally my ship came in and I wasn’t at the airport.” He was very excited. And here’s the homeless update. It’s a despicable iPhone tracking scheme that targets homeless people. It’s been uncovered in Denver by Channel 9 Eyeball News. It’s 9Wants to Know is the name of the news, 9Wants to Know. So do we.
Anyway, homeless people are desperate for cash, and other people are desperate for cash. And apparently some scammers have come along and have found a way to scam the homeless. What they do, they approach homeless people — I guess they can tell a homeless person when they see one. They go up to the homeless person and they offer them money to go to an Apple store and buy, on contract, iPhones. They give them the money to go in and buy the phones on contract, meaning with AT&T, with Verizon, they give the homeless people enough money to go in and sign up buying a bunch of iPhones.
Once the transaction is done, the homeless people come out of the Apple store and they are paid a couple of hundred dollars in exchange for the phones. The con men then walk away with brand-new iPhones, and the homeless somehow unwittingly have signed up for two years with Verizon, two years with AT&T. (laughing) I’m sorry for laughing here. But the homeless end up with bills of $6,000 ’cause the scammers then sell the phones and people start using them. They sell the phones contract-free. They go out and they say, “Hey,” and they send a lot of them to China, whatever, “Hey, look, you want an iPhone? It’s already got AT&T, you gotta pay nothing.” The homeless get the bill.
It has been discovered. According to 9Wants to Know in Denver, the scammers “cruise around homeless shelters, the 16th Street Mall, and plasma donation clinics in an effort to find people desperate for money. The men will drive victims to Apple stores and convince them to sign numerous contracts for numerous iPhones,” convincing them the contracts can be canceled within a few days. But that’s not the case, can’t do that, and the unsuspecting homeless victims will not be able to actually cancel the new contract free of charge.
A 19-year-old Denver woman said, “I thought it was amazing money. I had rent due the next day and I was looking to pay it.” The next thing I knew, I got bills totaling $6,000. Now, there are some obvious questions here, but I’ve gotta take a break. How can this possibly work? But we’ll ask ’em when we get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, in Denver apparently the police have been contacted about the homeless scam and they’re not gonna do anything about it. The cops are not gonna investigate. They deemed it to be an unfounded civil issue, whatever that is. Now, the carriers like AT&T and Verizon are supposedly aware of the problems but not all of them have provided a comment. Sprint said that once it started selling the iPhone it saw rampant credit mulling all over the country, which I guess is what this is.
If you’re at an Apple store and here comes a homeless person with a shopping cart or whatever and wants to buy a multiple number of iPhones, I guess it’s kind of like if they walked in during the home subprime mortgage thing and wanted a house, you gave ’em one. It must be the same kind of thinking. They had the ability to sign. But don’t you have to have — you’re homeless, an address, credit card, sign up, somehow the scammers take care of all that.