What’s going on here?

Andrew Gelman, who runs the very interesting blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, got a weird phone call a couple of hours ago, and is wondering what it might be all about:

Just got a weird phone call from two people who claimed to be from the New York Times, asking me very vague questions. They said someone recommended my name to them, but they wouldn’t say who recommended them. They asked me what my research was about, and I said I do a lot of research so it would help if they could tell me what their story was about. They said they couldn’t tell me. I recommended they go to my webpage and look at my published and unpublished papers and then if they had any questions they could ask me something specific. Or they could send me an email. It was a very weird conversation. At one point they asked me what I thought about political changes in recent decades (I can’t remember the exact question) and what did I think about the upcoming election. It still wasn’t clear what they were asking me. I concluded the conversation by saying that if they had questions they should email me and identify themselves in the email.

It was all super weird. My guess is that they are not from the Times or from any news organization at all! Really creepy, actually. Maybe it was some sort of scam—they keep me on the line long enough and then they switch to some investment pitch? Or maybe they were some far-left or far-right political group trying to get me to say something that they could twist into an endorsement of their position? I have no idea. It seemed so pointless to me, but at no point was it funny enough to be explainable as a prank call.

I’d rather not think about this any further, but I thought maybe I should post it here just in case these people, whoever they are, try to misrepresent me or others who they were calling in this way. Maybe they’re calling all the Columbia professors? I have no idea.

This really doesn’t seem to fit any of the obvious phone scams I’m familiar with, I’m curious if people have any ideas about what could be going on here.