The scams are getting a bit meta. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a warning about a new scam currently making the rounds. But this time, the con artists aren’t impersonating a politician or celebrity to trick consumers.They’re claiming that they are the ones sounding the alarm at the FTC.
Real FTC officials explained the general scheme in an alert released on October 22. Scammers call a target to tell them that bad actors in another country have registered a separate phone using their name and number for nefarious purposes. The imposter may even “transfer” you to a fake police officer to file a report. Fake badge numbers and IDs are also offered to make it all sound legitimate, and skeptics may even be directed to verify everything by searching for the police department’s phone number online (also fake). Failure to comply allegedly results in the loss of your personal phone number.
Those who follow through with the instructions provide scammers with their state-issued ID and other personal info for the bogus police report, but it’s not over yet. Some time later, targets will receive another call informing them that they will soon be arrested for those nonexistent crimes committed using their phone number. The solution? Transfer money for a security deposit.
“None of this is true—it’s all a scam,” assured the FTC.
To prevent unnecessary headaches, the FTC listed a few ironclad rules. Actual FTC employees will never contact you about sending money, or transfer you to someone else requesting funds. The FTC will never threaten to disconnect your phone number, or ask you to keep your conversations secret from others. Finally, they will never text a photo of the supposed employee ID as a way to verify their identity to you.
Unfortunately, combatting scammers is a bit like playing a neverending game of Whack-a-Mole. While the FTC has a list of common ways to spot government imposters, they encourage everyone to report the latest con jobs to ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
When it comes to buying a home, many people pay a premium for privacy. But one new listing Carlton, Kansas, takes the cake. For a measly $1.6 million, someone can call a converted Cold War Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silo home. Though the site sits on 18.2 acres of rural grassland, nearly the entire complex is hidden underground, save a single ominous steel door. The silo trenches down 182 feet, eventually leading to a two floor launch control center retrofitted to fit the modern world.
Surrounding the entire complex are 600 tons of steel rebar and six-foot-thick epoxy concrete walls meant to withstand nuclear blasts and 500 mph winds. The listing’s website calls it quite possibly “one of the most hardened structures ever built by man.” Once the staging ground for nuclear Armageddon, the indoor launch control center has been converted into a 2,200-square-foot, two bedroom, two bath, home outfitted with generic modern appliances. To top it all off, it is caked in a fresh coat of muted millennial gray and white paint.
The only clear sign of the bunker above ground is a single metal door. Image: North Star Missile Silo
From launch control to living room
This particular missile silo was part of the United States Air Force’s Atlas F Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Program. The Atlas program began toward the end of World War II, and produced the country’s first operational ICBM. At its peak, from late 1962 to mid-1964, 132 of these Atlas sites were built around the country.
According to the National Park Service, north-central Kansas’ Atlas F was “by far the best” of the Atlas variants ever deployed. The missile stood 82 feet tall and carried a 4.5 megaton warhead, roughly 300 times as powerful as the 15-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Aside from the Kansas location, there were 72 Atlas missile sites stationed on bases in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and New York.
Though advanced for its time, the Atlas was soon eclipsed by the even stronger Titan and then Minuteman systems.The majority of the Atlas systems were decommissioned in 1979, when President Richard Nixon signed the SALT (The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) treaties. That meant dozens of the massive structures were left dormant. Many of those relics have taken on new lives as luxury apocalypse bunkers or gimmicky rentals.
A 40 foot underground tunnel connects the retrofitted launch control to the missile silos. Image: North Star Missile Silo.
A buyer interested in viewing the North Star Missile Silo in Kansas would really have to know what they’re looking for. Getting there requires driving through a seemingly nondescript stretch of grassland before eventually coming up on a large gated fence with the iconic yellow “Fallout Shelter” signage on its side. Once inside, a surreal-looking steel door jutting out of the quiet countryside offers a clue to the shelter. It looks like a portal to some eerie, distant world, which, in some sense, it really is.
Once through the door, visitors descend a metal staircase that leads to a 40-foot tunnel. Photos show a narrow, claustrophobic walkway encased in a ring of white metal beams. At the end of the walkway stands a pair of imposing 7,000-pound blast doors. Home sweet home!
But the weirdest part about the retrofitted missile silo house is how remarkably normal much of it looks on the inside. The living quarters feature a floor plan with two bedrooms, two kitchens, and two bathrooms spread across two floors. Stainless steel appliances and a washer and dryer sit alongside standard wooden cabinets, none of which would look out of place in any hastily built rental unit across the country. The central area is laid out loft-style, showing off the control center’s massive support column. Visually, everything seems out of context. It evokes a slightly off not quite right AI-generated version of a house, or a modern millennial apartment that a visiting alien might describe to fellow interstellar travelers.
The loft style interior is built around the control’s center’s missive support column. Image: North Star Missile Silo.
It’s an undeniably weird place to live full time, but not a half-bad survival bunker. The listing notes that it features two separate sewage systems (one above ground and one underground) humidity control, a cellphone phone signal repeater and a solar power powered seven foot chain link gate. It also has ample room for solar or wind energy installation, though the buyer would have to install those. It’s also not necessarily limited just to survival or end time doomers. Realtor.com notes that the silo was previously used as a rental, though he also said there was interest in using it as an off-the grid conference site or even a wedding venue.
A new era of fancy bunkers
Many Cold War relics have taken on new lives as quirky rental and luxury condominiums. Airbnb shows a number of silos available for short term stays in New Mexico, Kansas, and southern Texas. Some of these explicitly court “prepper” audiences with fat wallets. Possibly the best known of those is Survival Condo, located about 200 miles outside of Kansas City, That sprawling Atlas Missile Silo was converted into a 15 floor luxury condominium outfitted with a pet park, climbing walls, swimming pool (with a slide) library and a movie theater. The starting asking price for one of the units? Around $1 million in 2020 dollars.
And while Cold War bunkers are relics of the past, new interpretations of the structures are still being built. In the U.S. and abroad (New Zealand attracts a particular amount of attention) a subset of the world’s wealthiest elites are reportedly constructing their own apocalyptic lairs. Some of the best known examples of those billionaire bunker builders are in the tech industry with some racing to build advanced AI models that are increasingly putting them at odds with public opinion. Aside from escaping the pitchforks, the Kansas listing also notes one more potentially enticing incentive.
“Underground structures not taxable by [the] County.”
Fall is here, and with it comes very determineddeer. Mating season for the hoofed ruminants typically begins once temperatures dive and the days grow shorter, but the annual event also poses problems for humans. The deer have one thing on their mind, which means they pay even less attention to vehicles and roadways. In New Jersey, roughly 41 percent of all annual animal collisions occur between October and December, while the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety routinely tallies over 275 fatalities from similar accidents nationwide every year.
Driving gets even riskier in rural areas, which frequently host higher deer populations and much darker roads. However, a recent pilot program in Virginia offers a promising tool that may keep commuters safe while also allowing the animals to do their thing. At the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), researchers designed an automated digital roadside sensor system that warns drivers of large jaywalkers like deer and elk.
According to VTTI engineer Shreyas Bhat, the year-long trial demonstrated a “measurable change” in how local drivers responded when alerted to oncoming wildlife. Bhat and his colleagues tested the system with help from the state’s Department of Transportation along a 14-mile section of Route 460 in southwest Virginia. The array was composed of eight portable, solar-powered trailers and customizable digital message signs. Each station included thermal cameras analyzed by onboard machine learning software, which triggered the sign alerts whenever it flagged nearby medium– to large–sized animals.
Over the course of the trial, researchers amassed driving data on over 10,000 vehicles, while the detection system maintained an estimated accuracy of around 97 percent. This is particularly impressive given the region’s environmental and infrastructural challenges.
“This system is unique because of the requirements of the area—it needed to be solar powered, portable, and be able to withstand all weather conditions,” explained VTTI engineer Jean Paul Talledo Vilela.
The team reported an average reduced speed of about three miles per hour thanks to the roadside warning signs. That may not seem like much, but even a slight slowdown can save lives. It also proved people took note of the system.
“Speed is an important data point to understand if drivers were actually paying attention to the message board,” said Talledo Vilela. “Even if they are not braking aggressively, some reduction in speed indicates that they may be paying more attention to their surroundings because they got that alert.”
While Talledo Vilela, Bhat, and their collaborators are still parsing through data from the program,(it ended in September) the initial findings remain promising. From here, the team hopes to refine the overall system while organizing future trials in other regions of the country. If successful, the relatively simple installations could also be adapted for other year-round road safety situations like construction or real-time weather hazards.
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