I’m going to try and give everyone a bit of clarity here because Midnight probably won’t. I’m not speaking on behalf of Midnight, the creator and sole operator of the hotline, but rather sharing insights from our conversations and my own opinions.
Running the hotline requires an enormous amount of effort on Midnight’s part. Although I won’t delve into the specifics, the convenience you all appreciate comes at the cost of increased workload for Midnight. Essentially, he is managing a complex and high-capacity PBX system, searching for numbers, dealing with bad actors, reviewing logs, and shutting down problematic lines. He is doing all your work and a whole lot more to make your lives easier, for free.
Due to the nature of the hotline, the baits are more entertaining than they are productive. From my personal analysis, the concentration of baiters using the hotline, instead of organic numbers, has negative consequences on our efficiency as a community. Unfortunately, there are many aspects I can’t disclose here so I can’t give you the full picture, but it is my belief that more victims would be saved hunting organically or just using the numbers posted than using the hotline.
Fortunately, there was less abuse with this iteration of the hotline, and I’d like to express my gratitude to everyone for that. However, the bottom line is this: the hotline is enjoyable for everyone except Midnight. He is overwhelmed with work that amuses us but could potentially contribute to more people falling victim to scams because we are letting more scammers get away by using the hotline instead hunting for numbers. Furthermore, Midnight and our team prioritize victim advocacy, so this project is not our main focus. Every second we spend fixing this for everyone’s entertainment is a second we aren’t spending helping someone’s grandmother.
I did propose the idea of turning the hotline into a subscription or freemium service, as I saw some of you say that you are willing to pay, but Midnight wasn’t interested. This decision doesn’t revolve around cost. While Midnight might occasionally activate the hotline for a few days, operating it continuously requires us to put in a prohibitive amount of energy. When we were operating it for SP’s streams, it wasn’t being operated for multiple days at a time and it was easier to operate as there was generally just one or two people using it. We can still turn it on but I think at this point Midnight is burned out and sick of it, but I’ll see if we can turn it on in bursts, maybe it can be a weekly or semi weekly thing where everyone jumps in on the hotline for a few hours on Fridays or something. The true power in the hotline is really just entertainment in my mind, so it is still worth turning it on for SP or whichever streamer to get more people interested in scambaiting, but if you guys want to make the biggest impact you can, the hotline just isn’t that. Before you offer, we are not looking for help operating the hotline :).
I hope this helps answer some of the questions you guys have. I will do my best to respond if you guys still have more. You can support midnight by checking out his youtube.