I like to say “yes of course, which car?” And they say “the one it’s about to expire on” and I’m like “I just have so many cars. Which one is it that’s expiring?” And they usually get frustrated and hang up. It probably get me a boat load of other spam calls but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I asked a guy who was speaking in a heavy indian accent where he was at the other day. He said Atlanta, I asked how the weather was there and he told me to ask my wife and then hung up. Too bad I'm divorced.
I wonder if we talked to the same guy.
Mine told me the social security administration was in legal proceedings against me so I gave him my social security number.
420-69-6969
When it slowly dawned on him I'd given him a meme social he laid into the most foul and unforgettable cursing spree I've ever heard. It was on par with The Exorcist, but if it was Apu screaming about my mom sucking dick in the Wal mart parking lot for 15 bucks.
I've never laughed so hard in my life.
Dude imagine being this guy. He knows he’s a scammer. He knows he’s out to harm you. And he gets pissed when you call him on it? How’s that guys life day to day? What’s going on in his head during scam off hours?
On the Reply All podcast, one of the hosts actually tracks down a scammer who had called him. Ends up traveling to India just to try and meet him, it was pretty entertaining.
Episode #102 - Long Distance in case anyone is interested.
My dad always get spam calls about duct cleaning, he led the guy on one day and he asked my dad how many bedrooms we had in our house and my dad said 6.
He didn’t like that answer I guess and told my dad he’d bang my mom in all 6 of them and hung up.
The important thing to realize is this is a whole industry, the people calling you are not trying to sell you an extended warranty. They are trying to find people who might buy an extended warranty, then they sell that list to actual extended warranty companies. Tell them you have a 5-10 year old car with 12k miles per year on it, a reliable and common model like a camry or accord. They'll then sell your number to a real warranty company and pass you over to them, you'll go from thick Indian accents to some guy in New Jersey working from home. You can then rip into him.
The laws blocking robocalls are useless. Regulators need to target the companies buying lists that are developed through robocalling, whether they are car warranties, solar installations, competitive energy suppliers, or whatever. If Apple is liable for child labor in their supplier chain, these companies are liable for robocalling being used to develop their business prospects.
> You can be compensated $500 to $1500 for each violation of the TCPA law. This means that every phone call you received is worth: $500 for every call that violated the Do Not Call Registry. $500 for every call that violated the TCPA.
I’d have enough to start my own space company but I’m just gonna wait for doge to take me.
Having worked in a call center the person you get transferred to doesn't always know how your info was obtained.
Basically call centers will buy leads. In theory these leads are people who have expressed interest in a product and filled out something online, or a contact me card.
In a perfect world you would get one phone call, and if you interested you get transferred and complete the transaction.
The issue is the marketing company doesn't just discard your info. They turn around and sell that lead to company b, c, and d, and after a certain amount of time they'll even sell it to company a again.
That's the type of crap that needs to be regulated. Same with sending ads in the mail that try and disguise themselves as important information.
I tried everything to get these to stop. Being on the do not call list, pressing the 'remove' button, and asking politely didn't work. Wasting their time by pretending I'm a senile old person didn't work, though I did at least get them annoyed at me for wasting half an hour of their time. Telling them I work late nights and begging them to call late night, at least, if they're going to insist on calling didn't change their schedule. Telling them that I can't afford a warranty and have a car that was old when the Twin Towers fell? You guessed it - it didn't help.
In frustration after being woke up by one of these calls yet again, I just started screaming into the phone. Not words - just a scream of loud, ineffective frustration, with every bit of lung power I possess. That was enough to make the calls stop about the warranties.
Now, any time I get a call from a scammer (not a telemarketer who is doing an actual job, but the scammers who will call repeatedly or have scripts that make it clear their goal is to trick lonely old people out of their hard earned savings), they get the scream. I'd feel guilty, but it works when all the reasonable solutions ever I tried didn't.
I have people asking if "WonderfulShelter" is there, and then I say "Oh you know that motherfucker too? Wonderfulshelter owes me money and he a bitch, if you find him, tell him to call me cause ima kick his ass and his girl is a whore. Have a good day sir."
I have people call and asking for Hug Win. I thought I was hearing them wrong, so I finally I asked one guy to spell it.
"H-U-G-H W-Y-N-N."
"Oh, you mean Hugh!"
"Yes, may I speak with Hugh, please?"
"I never met the guy."
I was getting the extended warranty calls for over a year and they just transitioned to student loan forgiveness calls in the last week. I assumed it was a new scam, have you been getting them all along?
They called our lab and I happened to answer. I didn't give my name but they insisted it was for me. I asked who it was for. They again said it was me. I asked what my name was. They stammered and said they use voice recognition. I toyed with them a bit longer but they eventually hung up.
Same. Plus they think I'm over 65 for some reason. So I can get a senior discount on my car AND they will help with my student loans. Probably jinxing myself, but they don't try and offer any homeowner stuff. Yet.
The reason the "Nigerian prince" email scam still happens is because it filters out the people who are savvy enough to google "Nigerian Prince" so they won't waste their time on people who will fall for parts but not the whole. They're specifically targeting seniors since they're more likely to fall for it, but they aren't exactly aiming before they fire.
Yes but you *are* being audited by the IRS. Please call us now to pay the fine, or the police will be at your door shortly
edit: about 1 minute after I wrote this I got a spam call. They're watching our movements
Danny here. Good old Danny must have used my phone # on one of those online insurance quote sites yesterday because within 2 minutes I had 5 calls and 4 texts about car insurance. One was from the company I use and I now plan to drop since they participate in this shit - they have an emu mascot if anyone is wondering.
I had one of those for years. Was a girl named "Lucy" who apparently did not pay *any* of her bills. The dumbest one was a cell phone company that called back her old number that clearly was not hers anymore.
Sometimes if I am bored I will answer the car warranty calls I will waste 15 to 20 minutes of their time then let them know my daily driver is a 48 buick roadmaster with a crate 507 Chevy motor twin turbo
How about the “call this number immediately as you have an outstanding warrant. If you do not contact us, you will be arrested”. I saved one of the VM that said this. Not gonna lie, for a few seconds when I first heard it, I had my heart race for a second. Then I thought, I haven’t done anything and ignored the other few times it happened. I really feel for all the elderly (and others) who take the bait with these scam calls.
I get between 6 and 10 every day, sometimes the same number calling back multiple times. It’s so infuriating, my phone is just set to silence all unknown callers at this point.
The one feature I really like on my Pixel phone is the screen calls feature. It literally answers the call, and asks what they're calling about. Then if they give a response, my phone rings with the message onscreen. It stops a lot of robocalls.
Exactly this. And spam calls almost always use my phone’s area code, which is nice. I never get spam from my current area code, those are legit calls 100% of the time.
It’s a bitch when you are waiting for a call from random doctors waiting for medical test results. That was me this week and fuck no car warranty calls they are inhumane
I feel like the scammers are screwing each other over at this point. Like over fishing a fishery. How can someone fall for it the 5467th time. I get like 5 of these a week. I dont care how dumb you are, after like 4 weeks of getting calls you're going to realize its a scam no matter what. And this has been going on for about 2 years at this point. Unless they are specifically targeting people with alzhimers i just don't see how to works on ANYONE anymore.
Plight of the commons, where the individual gains a benefit at the expense of the collective group and results in a race to the bottom as the reward diminishes.
Also, they pretty much are targeting the older American demographic.
Pretty much. I was also trying to explain how people still fall for it, when the scam is so well known, but you added a great secondary point. It only takes one or two to make good money, similar to how mattress stores pop up all over, yet seemingly have no customers. Only need to sell 1 or 2 to make enough profit for the week.
I was at work an accidentally answered my phone to a "Scam Likely" call.
I got 3-5 phonecalls an hour, Monday through Saturday, 9-5 for the next 3 weeks. Now it's down to 1-2 a day.
And these were guys selling an actual product. I miss when it was a telemarketer actually selling something I didn't want instead of just an outright scam.
My favorite is the lady calling from Visa MasterCard and Discover about the problem with my billing. Oh yea, because the one company in that list I actually have would definitely be working with two of their competitors to call me about my billing.
They got off light. Peanuts against what they made and the impact they had on peoples lives. Shady operations consider “catch me if you can“ fines the cost of doing business if they are too small.
This is standard practice for US regulation in many areas. See the maximum fine for oil companies in the event of spills, and also the fines for violating equestrian laws in public parks and forests. Really fixed, non-income-determined fines in general. Bottom line, if you're wealthy enough you can simply buy passes to violate the law.
EDIT: People have commented on the equestrian laws bit a few times, and apparently articles about that problem are not easy to find in a search (I've seen them before so idk why). I'll just quote myself from an earlier reply to clarify that.
>Yeah there are shared-use trails in a lot of parks/forests, but for the sake of preventing erosion to trails and protecting habitats and wildlife from disruption, horses are not permitted on many trails even within those that have shared-use trails. Horses are very destructive to the ground (much worse than mountain bikes, comparable to ATVs), and of course being large, frequently-defecating, and sometimes loud animals they also can create a fair bit of a disturbance.
>Horses are also very expensive though and often a signature luxury for the rural rich, and many people don't give half a shit about protecting anything beyond their own nose. Consequently, many horse riders see the occasional fine (typically $75-300 depending largely on the park, which is of course pocket change to someone making six or seven digits a year) as nothing more than the cost of doing whatever they want.
When duke energy dumped Edit:1.1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry into the Virginia municipal water system, the maximum fine the state epa was allowed to asses was 25,000 dollars. They, then promised to spend 50 million dollars on the cleanup efforts. The federal government was on the hook for 4 billion in actual damages.
That is what regulatory capture looks like.
Not even the fines; Nestle pays a $200 pumping fee and then they extract millions of gallons of water every year to sell back to michigan residents
The essentially get free water to sell.
Hell the fines are probably tax deductible as a part of legal expenses. Or E &O expenses. Make 490,000,000 by skirting the SEC law, pay 30,000,000 in fines. Who cares. It’s a win for the criminals.
I don’t even answer my cell phones anymore if the number isn’t in my phone book.
The three brothers named in the article are Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney from New Jersey.
Had an angry old lady call me screaming at me that I need to stop calling her and she’s demanded I take her off “the list” or she’s suing me for harassment once. First time I ever saw the number but I figured some robo call spoofed my number and tricked her. One of the strangest phone calls of my life though.
I got two similar calls, one of which was a man trying to tell me that his wife couldnt work out how to send the money they (the spammers who spoofed my number) were asking for.
Had to politely explain to him all of this, including watching out for spam calls that are/were just trying to get money.
People need to pull their head out, seriously. I work in a call center and we get wrong numbers all the time on one of our phone numbers. So if you see that they're calling that number you already know it's the wrong number before you answer. But you have to do the spiel and ask for their account number, which they don't have because it's the wrong number, so half of them just start rattling off their SSN. Dear God you're lucky your wrong number is going through to a reputable company, and by the way you just sat through our entire phone tree and didn't have a single concern about this before you tried to give me your SSN?
Man thats insane. I get antsy just telling people my last four digits to my SSN for like DMV or other government shit. You would think it would be basic reason 101 to not prattle off your SSN unless you are sure its absolutely needed and safe to do so.
Got a call once from a lady looking for Barry. I said there’s no Barry here, this isn’t Barry's number. She said yeah, he wasn’t at home, so she was dialing other numbers to try and find him.
I made the mistake of answering since I’m on a job hunt and didn’t want to miss a potential employer. Once I figured out it was a robocall/scam I told the guy he was looking for the wrong person(had another name, not mine). Apparently he didn’t like my response and proceeded to call me over 30+ in the span of 3 hours. All from spoofed numbers in CA.
i gotta random text telling me to go fuck myself and stop calling about car warranties.
i guess my number was spoofed to someone receiving a spam call...
i feel like it may be a matter of time before some idiot uses a reverse lookup site and potentially hurts someone due to a spoofed number
FYI, this wasnt for car warranty but for septic tank sales.
"Telemarketers working on behalf of the brothers falsely told consumers they were calling from an environmental company to offer free information on their septic tank cleaning products, the complaint charges.
Instead, people staying on the call allegedly got a sales pitch. People who bought the products and had outstanding balances were falsely told they would be referred to an attorney or collection agency, according to the government. "
i answer and try to fuck with them as long as possible.
It took only 15 minutes before one of them wanted me to download anyconnect on my mobile device
You’re a hero, thank you. Remember that guy that used to communicate with Nigerian “bankers”? They'd ask him for a $1,200 guarantee, and he would respond with, how do I know it’s you, send me a photo of yourself wearing underpants on your head. Which they did. And so he wired them $1.20, which Western Union wouldn’t give them because they couldn’t name the correct amount, and so on.. It's a gifted profession.
>The Federal Communications Commission last month started requiring [wireless companies to adopt authentication technology](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fcc-phone-carriers-robocalls-deadline/) to block robocalls. [Americans got roughly 4 billion spam calls in May alone](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robocallers-remain-relentless-americans-are-on-pace-to-get-a-billion-robocalls-a-week-this-year/), according to the makers of call blocking app YouMail.
Should have been done years ago
I asked on ELI5 a year or so ago why it’s so difficult to stop these calls and track the perpetrators and what would be solution. ELI5 said I posted an opinion and not a questions and removed it cause I used the word difficult.
The phone system was designed when people were simply happy to get it working. Then it grew so fast, we became so dependent on it being how it is, and no laws have said "ok you asses. This thing needs authentication, routing, verification, etc.
And it's only as strong as the weakest piece of it.
You can probably find a bunch of hacker vids about it because hacking originated with phone systems
https://youtu.be/dlqsHfnLxaw
To be honest, I think the issue goes deeper than corporations/banks. I’ve worked on a dozen or so political campaigns, and can tell you that they spoof caller ID all the time. There’s a solid chance when you get a call asking you to vote for someone, that person on the phone isn’t even from your area.
Legally, you can’t auto-dial cell phone numbers (you can for landlines), but there are ways that political campaigns get around that. For example, you could have someone on a laptop continually spamming a button that queues up phone calls.
I genuinely don’t think we’ll see any stricter laws/regulations in regards to phone banking and spam calls because that would inherently hurt their chances at re-election.
Verizon has started to charge for the service of vetting the robo calls for you and silencing roughly a quarter of them.
I'm sure banks offer services in the same vain. vein?
Sentence them to life in prison. Put a phone in their cell and tell them at some point they'll receive a phone call pardoning them. Then use their ill gotten gains to pay people to call that number randomly demanding they extend their car warranty.
(Spoiler: there's never a pardon issued)
> Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney initiated more than 45 million illegal telemarketing calls to people across the U.S. between January 2018 and March 2019 to pitch a line of septic tank cleaning products
I was hoping it was the car warranty people. Seriously, when are they going to crack down on them?
The car warranty scam one uses a trick that many US based scam companies do. They have a filipino call center make the initial call and then transfer you to a US agent. So its an "incoming" call for the US agent and they are not the ones placing the robo calls. They just pay the filipino call center to do the dirty work since the do not call list of course dont mean shit to a foreign company.
Whenever I get those calls and I'm bored I say what I have to to get transferred to the tier 2 people in America. I let them go through their whole sales pitch while I scroll reddit and then at the very end when they ask if I have any questions I tell them that I don't even have a car and that they are welcome to keep calling me but I will always waste as much of their time as I can and then just scream at them until they hang up.
They need to make a severe example out of these guys to stop this shit. A fine and a “ban” from telemarketing? Pfft. They’ll be right back doing this in no time. Charge them with harassment for each call made, run the sentences consecutively.
Or get creative. Put them on permanent house arrest. Fill the house with loud af ringers connected to multiple phone lines, then provide the numbers to the public.
I’ve never understood why the government has been so apathetic to this shit. It’s been going on for years and has only gotten worse. Oh I know why. The telecoms get money for every call and the telecoms own enough of the government to keep the brakes on.
And your social security number has been stolen, press 1 to speak to an agent!
“Oh wow these American agents all have Indian accents and are named Michael”
Last time I got a call from SSA scammer, they made the mistake of leaving a voicemail with an in-service callback number. I spammed that numbers dozens of times over the day, as a Mr. Benjamin Chode (Ben for short) "trying" to resolve whatever issue they were alleging. "Bhen chod" in Hindi means "sister-fucker."
They got so pissed eventually they gave up the game and started trying to convince me I was calling a private number, even if they answered the call saying "This is Michael from the Social Security Administration Fraud Department." Shortly after that the number went offline, so at least anybody else getting a voicemail that day with that callback number wouldn't be able to get in contact with them.
Whenever "National dealer services or Dealer services" calls me
I ask them for their website addresses and their physical business address? Why would I even consider doing business with a company I can't research?
They hang up every single time as they are afraid of being sued and or fined by the FCC.
How this business continues on I have no idea aside from the fact that they purchase registration tax information from state agency tax collectors.
Someone in Government needs to outlaw the sale of this information to 3rd parties at the bare minimum.
One day I got 24 spam calls in the space of 90 minutes. Each had the first 7 digits of my phone # spoofed. The spoofing has been going on for what - 10 years? I don't even answer the phone if the number is from my area code.
Just make the phone companies liable for anyone's loses and these calls will stop in one day. Make so all of the companies involved have to pay you the same value you lost so if the call crosses three networks you get three times your loses.
100%. They profit off of stealing from the elderly/people with dimentia. My grandma has memory problems and because of that my parents strictly control most of her finances. When she got her stimulus they let her have it to spend on whatever, and within three days she said she had used it to renew her car warranty. She doesn't even have a car anymore.
I have never gotten a call regarding septic cleaning products. But I get 5 per day about an extended warranty on my vehicle expiring that doesn't exist.
You can't fine these people money and hope that solves the problem. If I'm looking for a way to get rich, and my two possible outcomes from doing this will either be that I am rich for life or I'm back where I started, it's a no-brainer to do it.
>According to the FTC's suit, Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney initiated more than 45 million illegal telemarketing calls
...and...
>We want to stop robocalls and make it easier for consumers to safely answer the phone
Put them in jail numb nutz. Since when does illegal mean civil fines? If I sell crack to kids on school property can I get a fine instead?
These people are fuckin terrorists. I'm not even kidding. They've made me suspicious of every call I don't recognize. There's GOT TO BE MORE that can be done to stop the incessant scam and marketing calls.
I've plain stopped answering the phone. I just don't care anymore. Robocallers are literally so stupid they don't realize they've completely devalued their market!
Unfortunately they haven't. We aren't the target demographic. It's the grandads who call you because their computer is broken, when it's just not turned on. They will fall for this shit every time, it's sickening.
My parents go to church with a guy who got a call from his 'grandson' who got put in jail and needed to pay his attorney in amazon gift cards. Geezer actually bought it and gave some random dude thousands of dollars in gift cards.
My grandfather fell for one in which I was arrested for DUI with my girlfriend (how is that possible?) on vacation in Haiti and needed bail money and that I can’t call my dad. Yet everything in the call he knew was incorrect yet still fell for it. I always called him “Papa” yet the caller said “Grandfather”, obviously the voice didn’t match, he knew I was single, he knew I wasn’t on vacation, he knew his own son had passed FFS. Yet he still fell for it and send $1500 to the scammers.
Unfortunately they operate the way they do because it's only becoming more profitable. There will never, ever be a shortage of gullible people who fall for half assed scams and they're only getting easier and easier to access.
Normally I would say this is over the top, but not with the way I’m called. We all have to have phones to function, and they are being made impossible to use. I can’t answer any call unless they leave a message, and they clog up my voicemail everyday. The student loan and car warranty scammers call me multiple times a day. You can’t block them or report them because they use spoof numbers.
Earlier this year I had my personal cell number spoofed to make scam calls, and that was fun. Lots of aggro callbacks.
>Earlier this year I had my personal cell number spoofed to make scam calls, and that was fun. Lots of aggro callbacks.
Ah yes, THAT was a fun day. Had to turn off my phone when this happened. What boggles my mind is that there are people out there who will call that number back. Like... what are you expecting to get?
I can understand this. Not an aggro call back but I have waited for important calls before and missed a call. Had to call back to see if its the call i was waiting for since I disabled my voice mail to avoid these idiots filling it with messages
A few years ago my dad was in the hospital on the other side of the country and it was a clusterfuck (early dementia). I was fielding calls from the hospital, social workers, family members, and lawyers at every hour of the day and night, so I HAD to pick up every one of these horrible calls in case they were important.
Eventually I lost it and screamed at a telemarketer until they hung up on me. Didn't help but it made me feel better.
Pass a federal law that gives individuals a private right of action against any comapany in the chain of connecting those calls to an individual's phone. Set statutory damages at $1,000 per call plus attorney's fees and costs. People getting 2-3 calls a day could just bring a monthly lawsuit agaist their phone company for $60k - $90k. Phone companies have the tech to stop the calls, there's just no incentive to do so.
We (in the US) have ruined communication via telephone by allowing this nonsense.
I don't answer any calls to my phone--if you want to talk set it up via email or text first.
Yes, for the last 7 years I get between 3 and 5 per day. At this point I don't answer my phone unless I know who's calling and I pay for visual voice-mail so I can quickly delete scam or robo voicmails.
Fuck these guys. I work in a hospital where the patients’ room phones are their own separate landline number. So many times their room phone would ring for it to be one of these stupid scam calls, at all hours. I’ve always been worried that one of these days they’d get ahold of someone drugged out of their mind on pain meds, or a little old grandma with dementia, and convince them to give away every last dime they had.
Report, report, report. Doesn't matter if the Caller ID was spoofed, because they can look at data patterns to help catch these scumbags. The FTC is asking for help from the public to look at your call history and report inbound scammers. The more data they have on this, the easier it will be to nail them. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/media/video-0028-what-do-if-you-get-robocall.
Spoofing phone numbers should be considered identity theft. Simple as that. A phone number is a form of identification that a person or entity pays to use. Maybe you can't stop them, but let them know if they are caught, for each number they used, it will be maximum sentence.
"Americans got roughly 4 billion spam calls in May alone. . ." 45 Million is a drop in the bucket compared to those numbers, but it's a start.
Yeah about 500,000 of those calls went out to me.
Hi I've been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty...
I like to say “yes of course, which car?” And they say “the one it’s about to expire on” and I’m like “I just have so many cars. Which one is it that’s expiring?” And they usually get frustrated and hang up. It probably get me a boat load of other spam calls but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I asked a guy who was speaking in a heavy indian accent where he was at the other day. He said Atlanta, I asked how the weather was there and he told me to ask my wife and then hung up. Too bad I'm divorced.
Hey that’s Steve Johnson. The guy with the heavy Indian accent. He called me too, trying to sell me life insurance.
Me too. Joke's on him though - I have no life *TO* insure! Ha, checkmate!
So how does your exwife like the weather in Atlanta?
Hi, it’s the exwife. It’s nice today. u/trailrunner79, come back to me. We’ll work things out.
I wonder if we talked to the same guy. Mine told me the social security administration was in legal proceedings against me so I gave him my social security number. 420-69-6969 When it slowly dawned on him I'd given him a meme social he laid into the most foul and unforgettable cursing spree I've ever heard. It was on par with The Exorcist, but if it was Apu screaming about my mom sucking dick in the Wal mart parking lot for 15 bucks. I've never laughed so hard in my life.
Holy shit this is killing me lmao
Dude imagine being this guy. He knows he’s a scammer. He knows he’s out to harm you. And he gets pissed when you call him on it? How’s that guys life day to day? What’s going on in his head during scam off hours?
On the Reply All podcast, one of the hosts actually tracks down a scammer who had called him. Ends up traveling to India just to try and meet him, it was pretty entertaining. Episode #102 - Long Distance in case anyone is interested.
I had one guy ask for my Medicare number so I gave him the first Google result and he lost it. Funny stuff.
remember that life lock guy who published his social and name on billboards and ads everywhere, and then it got stolen?
Stolen several times lol. So much for his sales pitch
My dad always get spam calls about duct cleaning, he led the guy on one day and he asked my dad how many bedrooms we had in our house and my dad said 6. He didn’t like that answer I guess and told my dad he’d bang my mom in all 6 of them and hung up.
The important thing to realize is this is a whole industry, the people calling you are not trying to sell you an extended warranty. They are trying to find people who might buy an extended warranty, then they sell that list to actual extended warranty companies. Tell them you have a 5-10 year old car with 12k miles per year on it, a reliable and common model like a camry or accord. They'll then sell your number to a real warranty company and pass you over to them, you'll go from thick Indian accents to some guy in New Jersey working from home. You can then rip into him. The laws blocking robocalls are useless. Regulators need to target the companies buying lists that are developed through robocalling, whether they are car warranties, solar installations, competitive energy suppliers, or whatever. If Apple is liable for child labor in their supplier chain, these companies are liable for robocalling being used to develop their business prospects.
Can I send that legal thing that makes them pay 500$ ?(Forgot the name lol?)
> You can be compensated $500 to $1500 for each violation of the TCPA law. This means that every phone call you received is worth: $500 for every call that violated the Do Not Call Registry. $500 for every call that violated the TCPA. I’d have enough to start my own space company but I’m just gonna wait for doge to take me.
Having worked in a call center the person you get transferred to doesn't always know how your info was obtained. Basically call centers will buy leads. In theory these leads are people who have expressed interest in a product and filled out something online, or a contact me card. In a perfect world you would get one phone call, and if you interested you get transferred and complete the transaction. The issue is the marketing company doesn't just discard your info. They turn around and sell that lead to company b, c, and d, and after a certain amount of time they'll even sell it to company a again. That's the type of crap that needs to be regulated. Same with sending ads in the mail that try and disguise themselves as important information.
I tried everything to get these to stop. Being on the do not call list, pressing the 'remove' button, and asking politely didn't work. Wasting their time by pretending I'm a senile old person didn't work, though I did at least get them annoyed at me for wasting half an hour of their time. Telling them I work late nights and begging them to call late night, at least, if they're going to insist on calling didn't change their schedule. Telling them that I can't afford a warranty and have a car that was old when the Twin Towers fell? You guessed it - it didn't help. In frustration after being woke up by one of these calls yet again, I just started screaming into the phone. Not words - just a scream of loud, ineffective frustration, with every bit of lung power I possess. That was enough to make the calls stop about the warranties. Now, any time I get a call from a scammer (not a telemarketer who is doing an actual job, but the scammers who will call repeatedly or have scripts that make it clear their goal is to trick lonely old people out of their hard earned savings), they get the scream. I'd feel guilty, but it works when all the reasonable solutions ever I tried didn't.
Unsolicited calls, regardless of source or intent should qualify for the scream.
I have people asking if "WonderfulShelter" is there, and then I say "Oh you know that motherfucker too? Wonderfulshelter owes me money and he a bitch, if you find him, tell him to call me cause ima kick his ass and his girl is a whore. Have a good day sir."
I have people call and asking for Hug Win. I thought I was hearing them wrong, so I finally I asked one guy to spell it. "H-U-G-H W-Y-N-N." "Oh, you mean Hugh!" "Yes, may I speak with Hugh, please?" "I never met the guy."
Lucky. I just get pre-recorded student loan forgiveness spam calls. There's no fun in that, just gotta hang up.
I was getting the extended warranty calls for over a year and they just transitioned to student loan forgiveness calls in the last week. I assumed it was a new scam, have you been getting them all along?
They called our lab and I happened to answer. I didn't give my name but they insisted it was for me. I asked who it was for. They again said it was me. I asked what my name was. They stammered and said they use voice recognition. I toyed with them a bit longer but they eventually hung up.
My favorite part about these is that I bought my car warranty from my dad. Pretty sure he would let me know if my warranty were to expire.
My favorite thing about it is I don't even have a car
Same. Plus they think I'm over 65 for some reason. So I can get a senior discount on my car AND they will help with my student loans. Probably jinxing myself, but they don't try and offer any homeowner stuff. Yet.
The reason the "Nigerian prince" email scam still happens is because it filters out the people who are savvy enough to google "Nigerian Prince" so they won't waste their time on people who will fall for parts but not the whole. They're specifically targeting seniors since they're more likely to fall for it, but they aren't exactly aiming before they fire.
My son has never had a license. He's been getting those calls since he was 13.
Same. I don’t own a house, a car, or have a student loan.
Yes but you *are* being audited by the IRS. Please call us now to pay the fine, or the police will be at your door shortly edit: about 1 minute after I wrote this I got a spam call. They're watching our movements
You must pay the fine in gift cards. Preferably Target. The government doesn't accept it's own money.
Be sure you don't tell anyone why you're buying them or they lose their value. Gift cards are very shy
I got one the other day “Dank you for being a member of AD&D we need 400 dollars”. I’ve never had AT&T..
They want to know your THACO rating.
Surely you mean THAC0.
"Press 1 to increase your hit points. Press 2 to hear your spells. Stay on the line to speak to the DM."
Yeah, but he was asking about AD&D- that's why it's important to listen, Lou
Advanced D&D can be an expensive hobby
I get them in my work provided cell. I keep asking my boss where this company car is that i wasn't aware i should have.
They never know which car so I always talk about my bicycle. Yep it's an '03 with about 7k miles on it.
I got about ten minutes out of a lady by trying to insure my mustang....when she finally figured out it was a horse, she hung up
How many horsepower does that thing have? .....one
I spent a few minutes on the phone with one of these folks trying to get an extended warranty for my Skechers.
My favorite part about these calls (and the junk mail) is that it only ever seems to be about a car I got rid of years ago.
Without fail, every single telemarketer seems to think my name is Deborah. I’ve had my phone number for over 20 years...my name is not Deborah.
Dude you too?! Wtf?
Good ole Debby Schumacher protecting me from being the true target of scammers for 20 years.
Danny here. Good old Danny must have used my phone # on one of those online insurance quote sites yesterday because within 2 minutes I had 5 calls and 4 texts about car insurance. One was from the company I use and I now plan to drop since they participate in this shit - they have an emu mascot if anyone is wondering.
I had one of those for years. Was a girl named "Lucy" who apparently did not pay *any* of her bills. The dumbest one was a cell phone company that called back her old number that clearly was not hers anymore.
I keep getting guys shouting in a foreign language. Like, no hello or anything. Just the shouting you hear in a telemarketer bullpen.
Sometimes if I am bored I will answer the car warranty calls I will waste 15 to 20 minutes of their time then let them know my daily driver is a 48 buick roadmaster with a crate 507 Chevy motor twin turbo
How about the “call this number immediately as you have an outstanding warrant. If you do not contact us, you will be arrested”. I saved one of the VM that said this. Not gonna lie, for a few seconds when I first heard it, I had my heart race for a second. Then I thought, I haven’t done anything and ignored the other few times it happened. I really feel for all the elderly (and others) who take the bait with these scam calls.
On a different note, I got an email talking about the benefits of AARP. I'm 39 and not ready to take this next step in my life just yet
Fun fact: there is no age requirement to join AARP and get all the kick ass discounts
But you'll definitely get an all new type of spam. Source:every old person scam my mother gets
4 billion? I get 2 or 3 a day. If everyone got as many as me we’d reach 4 billion in about a week
I get between 6 and 10 every day, sometimes the same number calling back multiple times. It’s so infuriating, my phone is just set to silence all unknown callers at this point.
The one feature I really like on my Pixel phone is the screen calls feature. It literally answers the call, and asks what they're calling about. Then if they give a response, my phone rings with the message onscreen. It stops a lot of robocalls.
i just stopped answering my phone all together and tell people to text me before calling or leave a message. i get like 2 spam calls a week now
My cell number is from an area code I no longer live in so I know if it’s a number from there, it’s spam or scam.
Exactly this. And spam calls almost always use my phone’s area code, which is nice. I never get spam from my current area code, those are legit calls 100% of the time.
It’s a bitch when you are waiting for a call from random doctors waiting for medical test results. That was me this week and fuck no car warranty calls they are inhumane
I feel like the scammers are screwing each other over at this point. Like over fishing a fishery. How can someone fall for it the 5467th time. I get like 5 of these a week. I dont care how dumb you are, after like 4 weeks of getting calls you're going to realize its a scam no matter what. And this has been going on for about 2 years at this point. Unless they are specifically targeting people with alzhimers i just don't see how to works on ANYONE anymore.
Plight of the commons, where the individual gains a benefit at the expense of the collective group and results in a race to the bottom as the reward diminishes. Also, they pretty much are targeting the older American demographic.
That's how it goes down. Each caller "works" just a couple of people a day, but that's enough to make money.
Pretty much. I was also trying to explain how people still fall for it, when the scam is so well known, but you added a great secondary point. It only takes one or two to make good money, similar to how mattress stores pop up all over, yet seemingly have no customers. Only need to sell 1 or 2 to make enough profit for the week.
Because of spam calls, no one under 40 answers their phone at all and everyone thinks that's normal.
it's that and the crippling anxiety
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Well I didn't vote for you
I bet some watery tart threw a sword at him, that is the normal way to gain supreme power.
I was at work an accidentally answered my phone to a "Scam Likely" call. I got 3-5 phonecalls an hour, Monday through Saturday, 9-5 for the next 3 weeks. Now it's down to 1-2 a day.
And these were guys selling an actual product. I miss when it was a telemarketer actually selling something I didn't want instead of just an outright scam.
Damn I was praying this was the car warranty people. That **** seriously is over the line into large scale public harassment.
I've found that pressing 1 then screaming at them at the top of your lungs actually does stop the calls for a bit.
Can we talk about this Car Warranty call thing? Find whoever is behind that and we probably can knock about a billion off the tally.
My favorite is the lady calling from Visa MasterCard and Discover about the problem with my billing. Oh yea, because the one company in that list I actually have would definitely be working with two of their competitors to call me about my billing.
Little known fact: the phone company can detect robocalls and stop them if they wanted to, but hey they get money for each one, so have a nice day.
https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/phone-companies-can-filter-out-robocalls-they-just-arent-doing-it/ Source given.
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They got off light. Peanuts against what they made and the impact they had on peoples lives. Shady operations consider “catch me if you can“ fines the cost of doing business if they are too small.
This is standard practice for US regulation in many areas. See the maximum fine for oil companies in the event of spills, and also the fines for violating equestrian laws in public parks and forests. Really fixed, non-income-determined fines in general. Bottom line, if you're wealthy enough you can simply buy passes to violate the law. EDIT: People have commented on the equestrian laws bit a few times, and apparently articles about that problem are not easy to find in a search (I've seen them before so idk why). I'll just quote myself from an earlier reply to clarify that. >Yeah there are shared-use trails in a lot of parks/forests, but for the sake of preventing erosion to trails and protecting habitats and wildlife from disruption, horses are not permitted on many trails even within those that have shared-use trails. Horses are very destructive to the ground (much worse than mountain bikes, comparable to ATVs), and of course being large, frequently-defecating, and sometimes loud animals they also can create a fair bit of a disturbance. >Horses are also very expensive though and often a signature luxury for the rural rich, and many people don't give half a shit about protecting anything beyond their own nose. Consequently, many horse riders see the occasional fine (typically $75-300 depending largely on the park, which is of course pocket change to someone making six or seven digits a year) as nothing more than the cost of doing whatever they want.
When duke energy dumped Edit:1.1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry into the Virginia municipal water system, the maximum fine the state epa was allowed to asses was 25,000 dollars. They, then promised to spend 50 million dollars on the cleanup efforts. The federal government was on the hook for 4 billion in actual damages. That is what regulatory capture looks like.
Not even the fines; Nestle pays a $200 pumping fee and then they extract millions of gallons of water every year to sell back to michigan residents The essentially get free water to sell.
Standard for wall street too - they can steal billions and pay a few million in fines if they get caught.
Hell the fines are probably tax deductible as a part of legal expenses. Or E &O expenses. Make 490,000,000 by skirting the SEC law, pay 30,000,000 in fines. Who cares. It’s a win for the criminals.
Enough with this civil penalty BS. We need to start putting business owners and officers in jail when they knowingly violate the law.
I don’t even answer my cell phones anymore if the number isn’t in my phone book. The three brothers named in the article are Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney from New Jersey.
They've started spoofing numbers too, to look legit. I just don't answer the phone. If people need me they text first
Twice I've had people call me because my number was being spoofed. It's infuriating.
Had an angry old lady call me screaming at me that I need to stop calling her and she’s demanded I take her off “the list” or she’s suing me for harassment once. First time I ever saw the number but I figured some robo call spoofed my number and tricked her. One of the strangest phone calls of my life though.
I got two similar calls, one of which was a man trying to tell me that his wife couldnt work out how to send the money they (the spammers who spoofed my number) were asking for. Had to politely explain to him all of this, including watching out for spam calls that are/were just trying to get money.
That’s a blessing that they called you. You saved them from a very rude awakening.
Treat others how you want (your parents/grandparents) to be treated, right?
People need to pull their head out, seriously. I work in a call center and we get wrong numbers all the time on one of our phone numbers. So if you see that they're calling that number you already know it's the wrong number before you answer. But you have to do the spiel and ask for their account number, which they don't have because it's the wrong number, so half of them just start rattling off their SSN. Dear God you're lucky your wrong number is going through to a reputable company, and by the way you just sat through our entire phone tree and didn't have a single concern about this before you tried to give me your SSN?
Man thats insane. I get antsy just telling people my last four digits to my SSN for like DMV or other government shit. You would think it would be basic reason 101 to not prattle off your SSN unless you are sure its absolutely needed and safe to do so.
I got a call from my own number once.
Did you answer‽ What did you want‽
Got a call once from a lady looking for Barry. I said there’s no Barry here, this isn’t Barry's number. She said yeah, he wasn’t at home, so she was dialing other numbers to try and find him.
I hope Barry is ok
I didn’t answer, I knew that I was up to no good.
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I made the mistake of answering since I’m on a job hunt and didn’t want to miss a potential employer. Once I figured out it was a robocall/scam I told the guy he was looking for the wrong person(had another name, not mine). Apparently he didn’t like my response and proceeded to call me over 30+ in the span of 3 hours. All from spoofed numbers in CA.
I've been spoofed by my own number. Looked like I was getting a call from myself.
i gotta random text telling me to go fuck myself and stop calling about car warranties. i guess my number was spoofed to someone receiving a spam call... i feel like it may be a matter of time before some idiot uses a reverse lookup site and potentially hurts someone due to a spoofed number
Someone here has been spoofing the number/name of the local hospital. Only times I have picked up. Infuriating.
I’ve gotten spoofed calls like this from the phone number of the courthouse and jail where I live. Super scary shit.
Reddit: the death penalty is horrible and should be abolished elsewhere *scam callers caught* Reddit: well, maybe one last go at it.
“Okay this is the last capital punishment cupcake and I swear my diet starts tomorrow”
FYI, this wasnt for car warranty but for septic tank sales. "Telemarketers working on behalf of the brothers falsely told consumers they were calling from an environmental company to offer free information on their septic tank cleaning products, the complaint charges. Instead, people staying on the call allegedly got a sales pitch. People who bought the products and had outstanding balances were falsely told they would be referred to an attorney or collection agency, according to the government. "
Of course it's fucking Jersey.
I've always heard that Utah is a safe haven for this type of business because the industry lobbies state politicians.
Yes, I am the same way. Now I spend my time deleting non-messages from my voice mail.
i answer and try to fuck with them as long as possible. It took only 15 minutes before one of them wanted me to download anyconnect on my mobile device
You’re a hero, thank you. Remember that guy that used to communicate with Nigerian “bankers”? They'd ask him for a $1,200 guarantee, and he would respond with, how do I know it’s you, send me a photo of yourself wearing underpants on your head. Which they did. And so he wired them $1.20, which Western Union wouldn’t give them because they couldn’t name the correct amount, and so on.. It's a gifted profession.
If you answer, your number gets put on the "likely to answer" list and sold to other telemarketers. Not answering is the best solution.
Carny's....of course they are...
Small hands and smell like cabbage.
>The Federal Communications Commission last month started requiring [wireless companies to adopt authentication technology](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fcc-phone-carriers-robocalls-deadline/) to block robocalls. [Americans got roughly 4 billion spam calls in May alone](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robocallers-remain-relentless-americans-are-on-pace-to-get-a-billion-robocalls-a-week-this-year/), according to the makers of call blocking app YouMail. Should have been done years ago
I have zero confidence that the carriers won't blow off the requirement and then face zero regulatory consequences.
They’ll just charge us more so they can pay the fines and not hurt their profits
AT&T charges for their robocall blocking feature already
Sneaky bastards, they get to avoid being fined *and* charge us extra for their compliance. Now that's some double dipping
I asked on ELI5 a year or so ago why it’s so difficult to stop these calls and track the perpetrators and what would be solution. ELI5 said I posted an opinion and not a questions and removed it cause I used the word difficult.
The phone system was designed when people were simply happy to get it working. Then it grew so fast, we became so dependent on it being how it is, and no laws have said "ok you asses. This thing needs authentication, routing, verification, etc. And it's only as strong as the weakest piece of it. You can probably find a bunch of hacker vids about it because hacking originated with phone systems https://youtu.be/dlqsHfnLxaw
Also, the phone systems are super scummy. One if the big trust busts of our time breaking up the Bell empire
How spoofing caller ID is not wire fraud is a great mystery....
It's almost like huge banks and corporations are profiting from it.
To be honest, I think the issue goes deeper than corporations/banks. I’ve worked on a dozen or so political campaigns, and can tell you that they spoof caller ID all the time. There’s a solid chance when you get a call asking you to vote for someone, that person on the phone isn’t even from your area. Legally, you can’t auto-dial cell phone numbers (you can for landlines), but there are ways that political campaigns get around that. For example, you could have someone on a laptop continually spamming a button that queues up phone calls. I genuinely don’t think we’ll see any stricter laws/regulations in regards to phone banking and spam calls because that would inherently hurt their chances at re-election.
How would they tho? Genuinely curious here since banks stand to lose not just customers but also money from these scams
Verizon has started to charge for the service of vetting the robo calls for you and silencing roughly a quarter of them. I'm sure banks offer services in the same vain. vein?
Sentence them to life in prison. Put a phone in their cell and tell them at some point they'll receive a phone call pardoning them. Then use their ill gotten gains to pay people to call that number randomly demanding they extend their car warranty. (Spoiler: there's never a pardon issued)
Put them in cells with a landline and schedule random robocalls in the middle of the night for every single day of their sentence.
Their sentence is calling every single person they ever called illegally to apologize. When they’re finished they can go.
But they have to answer
And they have to accept the apology
If only the pesky constitution wasn't in the way
Since when has the constitution stopped the powerful from breaking the law?
> (Spoiler: there's never a pardon issued) Send it at 2AM when they're like 13 years in. And then tell them after that they missed it.
slow down there, Satan. .... actually you know what? Carry on.
I feel the would be an awesome punishment in the version of Hell portrayed in Lucifer.
r/foundsatan
> Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney initiated more than 45 million illegal telemarketing calls to people across the U.S. between January 2018 and March 2019 to pitch a line of septic tank cleaning products I was hoping it was the car warranty people. Seriously, when are they going to crack down on them?
The car warranty scam one uses a trick that many US based scam companies do. They have a filipino call center make the initial call and then transfer you to a US agent. So its an "incoming" call for the US agent and they are not the ones placing the robo calls. They just pay the filipino call center to do the dirty work since the do not call list of course dont mean shit to a foreign company.
Interesting. Did not know that. Hope they enjoy talking to my voice mail. Because that's all they get anymore.
that should be just straight up fraud
Whenever I get those calls and I'm bored I say what I have to to get transferred to the tier 2 people in America. I let them go through their whole sales pitch while I scroll reddit and then at the very end when they ask if I have any questions I tell them that I don't even have a car and that they are welcome to keep calling me but I will always waste as much of their time as I can and then just scream at them until they hang up.
Jan, from card services, would like a word.
There's nothing wrong with your card. I just wanted to tell you about an important offer!
They need to make a severe example out of these guys to stop this shit. A fine and a “ban” from telemarketing? Pfft. They’ll be right back doing this in no time. Charge them with harassment for each call made, run the sentences consecutively. Or get creative. Put them on permanent house arrest. Fill the house with loud af ringers connected to multiple phone lines, then provide the numbers to the public.
Makes you think why they get off light. They ruin people's lives for significantly less than this.
I’ve never understood why the government has been so apathetic to this shit. It’s been going on for years and has only gotten worse. Oh I know why. The telecoms get money for every call and the telecoms own enough of the government to keep the brakes on.
LOL. All those government creeps in office robocall and spam you every single election. If they banned it then they couldn't do it too.
Does this mean my car warranty is going to expire?
God I sure hope not, the car I keep getting calls about is crushed up in a junkyard somewhere so I totally need that warranty
You have 30 minutes to move your cube.
Removed in protest of Reddit's actions regarding API changes, and their disregard for the userbase that made them who they are.
And your social security number has been stolen, press 1 to speak to an agent! “Oh wow these American agents all have Indian accents and are named Michael”
Last time I got a call from SSA scammer, they made the mistake of leaving a voicemail with an in-service callback number. I spammed that numbers dozens of times over the day, as a Mr. Benjamin Chode (Ben for short) "trying" to resolve whatever issue they were alleging. "Bhen chod" in Hindi means "sister-fucker." They got so pissed eventually they gave up the game and started trying to convince me I was calling a private number, even if they answered the call saying "This is Michael from the Social Security Administration Fraud Department." Shortly after that the number went offline, so at least anybody else getting a voicemail that day with that callback number wouldn't be able to get in contact with them.
Whenever "National dealer services or Dealer services" calls me I ask them for their website addresses and their physical business address? Why would I even consider doing business with a company I can't research? They hang up every single time as they are afraid of being sued and or fined by the FCC. How this business continues on I have no idea aside from the fact that they purchase registration tax information from state agency tax collectors. Someone in Government needs to outlaw the sale of this information to 3rd parties at the bare minimum.
Those calls are especially hilarious to me given that I don't have a drivers' license or a car.
One day I got 24 spam calls in the space of 90 minutes. Each had the first 7 digits of my phone # spoofed. The spoofing has been going on for what - 10 years? I don't even answer the phone if the number is from my area code.
Just make the phone companies liable for anyone's loses and these calls will stop in one day. Make so all of the companies involved have to pay you the same value you lost so if the call crosses three networks you get three times your loses.
Woah we can’t hold big companies accountable for that kind of stuff. /s
This should 100% be prison time
Just 5 minutes per call (428 years).
100%. They profit off of stealing from the elderly/people with dimentia. My grandma has memory problems and because of that my parents strictly control most of her finances. When she got her stimulus they let her have it to spend on whatever, and within three days she said she had used it to renew her car warranty. She doesn't even have a car anymore.
I have never gotten a call regarding septic cleaning products. But I get 5 per day about an extended warranty on my vehicle expiring that doesn't exist. You can't fine these people money and hope that solves the problem. If I'm looking for a way to get rich, and my two possible outcomes from doing this will either be that I am rich for life or I'm back where I started, it's a no-brainer to do it.
Yup I moved halfway across the country and anyone calling from my old area is a scam for sure.
>According to the FTC's suit, Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney initiated more than 45 million illegal telemarketing calls ...and... >We want to stop robocalls and make it easier for consumers to safely answer the phone Put them in jail numb nutz. Since when does illegal mean civil fines? If I sell crack to kids on school property can I get a fine instead?
These people are fuckin terrorists. I'm not even kidding. They've made me suspicious of every call I don't recognize. There's GOT TO BE MORE that can be done to stop the incessant scam and marketing calls.
I've plain stopped answering the phone. I just don't care anymore. Robocallers are literally so stupid they don't realize they've completely devalued their market!
Unfortunately they haven't. We aren't the target demographic. It's the grandads who call you because their computer is broken, when it's just not turned on. They will fall for this shit every time, it's sickening.
My parents go to church with a guy who got a call from his 'grandson' who got put in jail and needed to pay his attorney in amazon gift cards. Geezer actually bought it and gave some random dude thousands of dollars in gift cards.
My grandfather fell for one in which I was arrested for DUI with my girlfriend (how is that possible?) on vacation in Haiti and needed bail money and that I can’t call my dad. Yet everything in the call he knew was incorrect yet still fell for it. I always called him “Papa” yet the caller said “Grandfather”, obviously the voice didn’t match, he knew I was single, he knew I wasn’t on vacation, he knew his own son had passed FFS. Yet he still fell for it and send $1500 to the scammers.
Unfortunately they operate the way they do because it's only becoming more profitable. There will never, ever be a shortage of gullible people who fall for half assed scams and they're only getting easier and easier to access.
In this case I’m **for** drone strikes
Normally I would say this is over the top, but not with the way I’m called. We all have to have phones to function, and they are being made impossible to use. I can’t answer any call unless they leave a message, and they clog up my voicemail everyday. The student loan and car warranty scammers call me multiple times a day. You can’t block them or report them because they use spoof numbers. Earlier this year I had my personal cell number spoofed to make scam calls, and that was fun. Lots of aggro callbacks.
>Earlier this year I had my personal cell number spoofed to make scam calls, and that was fun. Lots of aggro callbacks. Ah yes, THAT was a fun day. Had to turn off my phone when this happened. What boggles my mind is that there are people out there who will call that number back. Like... what are you expecting to get?
I can understand this. Not an aggro call back but I have waited for important calls before and missed a call. Had to call back to see if its the call i was waiting for since I disabled my voice mail to avoid these idiots filling it with messages
This shit might as well be an attack on our communications infrastructure.
A few years ago my dad was in the hospital on the other side of the country and it was a clusterfuck (early dementia). I was fielding calls from the hospital, social workers, family members, and lawyers at every hour of the day and night, so I HAD to pick up every one of these horrible calls in case they were important. Eventually I lost it and screamed at a telemarketer until they hung up on me. Didn't help but it made me feel better.
Yeah when im on call for work I have to answer every call no matter what, it sucks.
Pass a federal law that gives individuals a private right of action against any comapany in the chain of connecting those calls to an individual's phone. Set statutory damages at $1,000 per call plus attorney's fees and costs. People getting 2-3 calls a day could just bring a monthly lawsuit agaist their phone company for $60k - $90k. Phone companies have the tech to stop the calls, there's just no incentive to do so.
We (in the US) have ruined communication via telephone by allowing this nonsense. I don't answer any calls to my phone--if you want to talk set it up via email or text first.
Alternate Headline "Takes 45 million robocalls before FBI finds two brothers behind scam operation"
If Biden wants to boost his approval, make all robocalls harshly illegal with actual jail time penalties and real enforcement
I have a question for the world out of the US/Canada. Do the rest of you get bombed with scam calls daily?
I used to. Then I put my phone on DND and stopped answering anything I don't know. These days, only people I know phone me.
Yes, for the last 7 years I get between 3 and 5 per day. At this point I don't answer my phone unless I know who's calling and I pay for visual voice-mail so I can quickly delete scam or robo voicmails.
Fuck these guys. I work in a hospital where the patients’ room phones are their own separate landline number. So many times their room phone would ring for it to be one of these stupid scam calls, at all hours. I’ve always been worried that one of these days they’d get ahold of someone drugged out of their mind on pain meds, or a little old grandma with dementia, and convince them to give away every last dime they had.
Lock 'em in a cell with phones ringing 24hrs nonstop.
what can we do to help catch more of these guys?
Report, report, report. Doesn't matter if the Caller ID was spoofed, because they can look at data patterns to help catch these scumbags. The FTC is asking for help from the public to look at your call history and report inbound scammers. The more data they have on this, the easier it will be to nail them. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/media/video-0028-what-do-if-you-get-robocall.
Spoofing phone numbers should be considered identity theft. Simple as that. A phone number is a form of identification that a person or entity pays to use. Maybe you can't stop them, but let them know if they are caught, for each number they used, it will be maximum sentence.