Thanks to you Bob for helping to reduce the amount of outbound calls that can be made in any given hour. I try to waste as much of their time as I can I am always polite and typically they have no idea what I am doing. Typically, I do this while commuting so I have time to kill.
Yeah, I have read many of those posts. People are illiterate when it comes to internet complaints. They think that this site "is" the place that is calling/harassing them and post as if they are talking directly to the company/scammers themselves. It is just another example of how STUPID our society has become. Like this poster The Truth commented, they do not know how to use the internet or Google effectively. Blame it on Sodium Fluoride in their water and all the chemicals in processed food and stuff. It lowers I.Q. and it works really well. Just look at North America. It gets dumber with each passing decade. "We are seeing more and more people of lower intelligence populating the earth and fewer people of higher intelligence." Dr. Robert Blalock, speaking on the overall social effects of Fluoridation. It's so true too. Just surf the internet for a while and read forum posts and you will see just how dumb people are. They can't even spell, form a sentence or a complete thought. This is not the case in countries that have banned such food and water "additives". The people in those countries are not as dumb as people here. I totally get this post and the original poster is absolutely right! Some people just don't get the purpose of this site. It is to "inform people" Not to complain to these scammers or collectors directly.
Indeed! The National Do Not Call List (DNCL) is Free and run by the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission). It does NOT cost anything to add your number to the list. The list/service does not work for everyone, but it does cut down on the amount of these type of calls.
Statements like "I never answer these calls" I think are useful as they are a reminder to people who complain about the calls that they don't have to answer them! As for whistle-blowing as you call it, it's again a way to help others who may not be so "clever" as to know about spoofing & other techniques people use to hide where they are calling from. And yes, the caller already has your number otherwise they wouldn't be calling it! Duh! Talk about stating the obvious and not adding anything useful to the discussion! I suspect you are a collector &/or just a troll
My pride and joy was one done while I was commuting. Some Cancun vacation thing, where you have to pre-pay several hundred dollars to "reserve" your vacation (I'm sure you've gotten one). I talked to the guy for about 55 minutes, and I still don't think he figured out what I was doing. I've gotten so that I can keep most of them on the line for at least 10-20 minutes. If only 25 people a day did that - it would eliminate sales for 1 telemarketer. Given the number of calls they place, it wouldn't take that much of a percentage of the calls to paralyze a telemarketing campaign. The numbers are in our favor if we can use them.
It's like I've been saying for a couple of years now. Knowledge is no longer "power". Information is power. Anyone can make a power grab but with (the right) information you can change the world.
You are entirely true about that. If telcos would disable all the numbers that are deactivated or at the very least disable them it would help eliminate the spoofing that goes on. But in the mean time investing in a call blocker is the way to go, although it would be nice if there was a common list of known numbers to download into your app. Maybe in my free time I'll look into one but in the meantime...
>Statements like "I never answer these calls" I think are useful as they are a reminder to people who complain about the calls that they don't have to answer them!
Perhaps. I don't find "I never answer these calls" posts useful in the least, but your point may be valid.
> As for whistle-blowing as you call it, it's again a way to help others who may not be so "clever" as to know about spoofing & other techniques people use to hide where they are calling from.
I'm not sure you are addressing the same "whistle-blowing" concept. JanieJ was talking about the literal blowing of an actual whistle, sometimes an air horn, into the phone by people who think that it blast out the other end of the phone just as loud as it went in. It doesn't work that way for several technical reasons. The person who is getting the loudest noise hitting their ear/s is the person blowing the whistle/horn. Annoying to the telemarketer; maybe. That's about it, which leads directly to her next point...
> And yes, the caller already has your number otherwise they wouldn't be calling it! Duh! Talk about stating the obvious and not adding anything useful to the discussion!
Yes well, but then it's also an obvious point, as you seem to want made, to issue " a reminder to people who complain about the calls that they don't have to answer them! "
JanieJ's point is that the TMr has the personal home (or office) number of the victim, while the victim probably doesn't even have the valid number of the TMr's place of business. The telemarketer is a position to jot down the number of the victim for the purposes of making a personal vendetta upon the victim. And they work at the ideal place to make revenge calls, don't they? Victims considering annoyance retaliation against TMrs who call them, would perhaps benefit from being reminded that the advantage is unfortunately with the telemarketer, not themselves. There are more subtle (and fun!) ways to take revenge, usually involving wasting the TMr's time, which directly costs them money. Reporting NDNCR violations sometimes pays off in the long run, although you'll probably never know if your own reports counted for anything.
I encourage disrespecting violators of the NDNCR, but people should make an informed decision about what they may have to put up with in terms of blow-back.
Are you Janie with a name change? Since you seem to know exactly what she meant although she wasn't specific. Or maybe you've just spent more time on these threads than I have. Anyway, thanks for the clarification about whistle-blowing, I had incorrectly assumed the comment was figuratively referring to revealing someone's scam, not the literal blowing of a whistle or making some other annoying noise. Which leads to the whole "they have your number & you don't have theirs" - & why I think that really shouldn't matter. The only reason I can think of that these callers would develop a personal vendetta against someone to the point of targeting them for some kind of revenge would be if the "victim" went out of their way to anger the caller. Perhaps by doing something like the air horn, or trying to waste as much of their time as possible, or yelling at them, or any other of the myriad of things that people do to antagonize the person calling them. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not disagreeing that the callers may deserve these things, or those tactics may be beneficial in some cases. But anyone who chooses to do something like that should know they run the risk of making matters worse for themselves because they do have your number. This is why I'm an advocate of just ignoring them, since they get nothing out of calling me, but nothing about my number will stand out for becoming a target of specific abuse.
My take is that using an air horn or whistle lowers the person to the same level of the operation in question. In the end I refuse to answer calls from unfamiliar sources.
+2
Rick
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I find this site very useful when people have taken the time to roll with the telemarketer, feign interest, and ferret out their actual identity and address - in the case of remodeling contractors and home security systems, it's often necessary to set up a "fact-finding appointment" to learn who is behind the "Home Design Center" or "Tom from Home Protection" calls. It's a Mastercard Priceless moment to see the look on an ADT Security affiliated installer's face when they are asked to send their written do not call policy!
The vehicle warranty robocall scam was unearthed in part when a call recipient, t6ired of asking not to be called, feigned interest, then got the caller to say which company would appear on the recipient's credit card statement.
The FTC needs the actual identity to enforce its laws, as do private citizens filing lawsuits. This site is very helpful, and quality input will keep it as a useful resource. Some years ago the FTC's Lois Greisman observed in an interview that by interacting with the telemarketers, call recipients can learn who is actually calling.
That's correct, but when the calls get transferred to a business in the US, action is possible. And if memory serves me correctly, the FCC or FTC did prosecute several Microsoft technical support scammers located in India, presumably with assistance from the Indian government.
Reply to IP Freely: So do I!!! Too often. It wakes me up at night. Make it stop. There is too much distance between you and the caller to use it to discourage spam calls. Too bad. Sounds like a most appropriate pay-back.
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