When we published our harassment investigation back in 2014, scraping was painstaking manual labor. A person had to search the court records, pull the personal identifying information, dial the phone, and read from a script — and that tedium was quietly the annuitant’s best protection. There were only so many hyenas, and only so many hours in the day. That ceiling is now gone. What a floor full of telemarketers used to do, software can do at a scale and speed no human operation could match: court dockets mined automatically the moment they update, thousands of personalized scripts generated on demand, and synthetic voices that place the calls, sound human, adapt to what the annuitant says, and never tire, never get discouraged, and never stop out of simple fatigue.

Consider what that means for the disabled annuitant we described a decade ago — the one who got a call around each meal because answering the phone was already a struggle. Now imagine the caller is inexhaustible, sounds like a friendly neighbor, knows her settlement amount, her payment schedule, and her attorney’s name, and can dial from a fresh number every time. The faux friendliness our clients reported in 2015 was a performance a salesman had to keep up. A machine keeps it up forever, for free. The old TCPA arithmetic — five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars per illegal call — assumed a human had to make each one. When the marginal cost of a call falls to nearly nothing, so does the deterrent.

The frustrating part is that the defense hasn’t changed at all.

You cannot regulate every model or block every synthetic voice, and you will wear yourself out trying. But a name that never enters the public record can’t be mined, scripted against, or dialed — not by a person and not by a machine. Redact the PII, and the entire apparatus, however sophisticated it gets, has nothing to aim itself at. The tools got smarter. The answer is the same one we’ve asked for since 2014. It’s just more urgent now.