Our boss at Planet Money, Alex Goldmark, thought someone should do a story about the fact that we were all being overwhelmed with calls about extending our car’s warranty. I said I’d look into it, and at first, it didn’t seem very interesting – plus we’d done a bunch of episodes about robocalls. But then Alex was like: c’mon, there has got to be something!

So one call lead to another call, and I stumbled upon the story of one of the first, most bizarre, very lucrative yet very scammy providers of extended auto warranties.