it's spoofing your area code...
Posted on 08/09/2017 9:29:14 AM PDT by Swordmaker
An unfamiliar number appears on your cellphone. It’s from your area code, so you answer it, thinking it might be important,” Christopher Mele writes for The New York Times. “There is an unnatural pause after you say hello, and what follows is a recording telling you how you can reduce your credit card interest rates or electric bill or prescription drug costs or any of a number of other sales pitches. Another day, another irritating robocall. If it feels as if your cellphone has increasingly been flooded with them, you’re right.”
“In a Robocall Strike Force Report in October, the Federal Communications Commission said telemarketing calls were the No. 1 consumer complaint,” Mele writes. “The most simple and effective remedy is to not answer numbers you don’t know.”
“List your phones on the National Do Not Call Registry. If your number is on the registry and you do get unwanted calls, report them,” Mele writes. “Download apps such as Truecaller, RoboKiller, Mr. Number, Nomorobo and Hiya, which will block the calls… And then there is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which turns the tables on telemarketers. This program allows a customer to put the phone on mute and patch telemarketing calls to a robot, which understands speech patterns and inflections and works to keep the caller engaged.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Read the full article. The National Do Not Call Registry is certainly not a panacea. These unsolicited calls are an insidious problem and the lengths to which some of these scammers go (don’t say the word “yes” or they’ll use it to bill you) is criminal!
I agree except when trying to schedule medical appointments and similar exceptions. The IRS scam was my last straw. Infuriating!!
Don’t answer the phone.
Great idea when the phone is your business line.
I love when they call to tell me how to reduce my credit card debt. I have none. Never have.
I have an android based phone and use the app “Hiya” to screen calls. I think you can get it for iphones as well.
I have a google voice number for my business and constantly get bogus calls
They record the "yes," which can be used in a court dispute as evidence of a binding oral contract. Just them saying you agreed holds no such evidentiary weight.
The last time they said I may be interested in whatever they had, I asked them if the "Tammy request" was a recording. When they said "yes" I asked them if they really expected me to do business that the first thing they do is trick me into hearing them.
I haven't heard from since. That was three weeks ago and I was getting them in a couple times a month. If they ask if this is ? I'll just say "speaking." The Jolly Roger is hilarious. There was another guy who wold say crazy things to tele- markers that sometimes would cause the police to show up. My favorite was when a carpet cleaning company called, he said "Can you get blood out of carpet, 'cause I got lots of it here!" And when the manager picked up the phone, he denied everything. I think his name is Tom Mabe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7OgWcwgB50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=het71Gq0_LE
It sure is and at what cost to taxpayers?
They were charging us and sent bills. We refused to pay and they instituted a law suit, claiming we owed them several thousand dollars for "services rendered" for being on call for Windows PC support for each Windows PC we had in the office. Several problems with this scenario. 1) We are in-house support only; 2) they were charging us for TWO such contracts for the same number of computers; 3) we would never have agreed to such a support contract in the first place due to not needing such services, because; 4) we are a 100% Apple Mac office with one Linux machine.
Another similar one we were hit with was being charged for non-phone related charges through our office phone bill. When I called to find out why this charge was hidden in our phone bill, I was told by the phone company that they are just allowed to pass those bills on to their customers and get a percentage cut of the bill! Our bookkeeper thought it was a legitimate miscellaneous $29.95 per month phone company charge in a fairly large monthly phone bill and never challenged it. She just paid it and went on to the next bill in her stack.
I did challenge it, wondering what in the hell it was for, and chased it down through the phone company, and discovered it was a bill for third party company who merely started sending the phone company a bill which they started collecting several years before. I called them to find out what we had been paying for and why. . . and they too had a recorded "yes." on their computer as proof we had agreed for their "service." I recognized the voice saying "yes" (obviously clipped from something) as being the voice of our longtime receptionist who did not have ANY authority to agree to any contracts for the company. These bozos claimed that she had, according to the check boxes on their sales form, assured them she was a person who could sign contracts and checks for our company. I knew that was a total fabrication.
THAT bogus "contract" was for a service to monitor our utility bills to advise us if we were overpaying. . . which required us to call them and/or submit our utility bills to them so they could advise us on how to save energy. Right, sure, something we'd need on a monthly basis, spending $30 a month to save a few pennies by turning off the lights in unused rooms (that was literally an example of the kind of advise said they could offer that the guy gave me if their analysis found excess energy usage!). Never used, of course, irrespective of the fact we did not know we had said service.
The receptionist did not recall the original call at all (and she had an excellent memory). I turned our in-house attorney loose on these crooks and we got approximately $3700 in full refunds back, including legal fees, between them and the phone company which had ZERO in the way of any authorization to collect fees from this company. By the way, we got rid of that phone company shortly after that.
I realize that this is a cellphone-related thread, but for those of us who also still have a land line, there are a number of call blocker devices available for not much money which put an end to annoying calls for good.
I personally use one of these:
I have the original version and it has some serious drawbacks, but most of them have been fixed in newer versions.
In any event, the biggest advantage to this device is that your phone will NEVER ring for the vast majority of junk calls, unlike some similar devices and services like NoMoRobo which allow the phone to ring once. You don’t even have to explicitly blacklist junk numbers, though you can if you have to.
There are other similar devices on the market, all have their own strengths and weaknesses. But all of them have the capacity to save your sanity if you are plagued by robocalls and telemarketers.
It’s been so long since I’ve heard Rachel’s sweet voice I’ve almost forgotten who she is and how much I hate her!
nomorobo is free? Interesting, It appears the app itself is free, but does nothing unless you subscribe - $1.99 per month (or a slightly discounted price if you subscribe a year at a time).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qclvGBavL1E
has the three tone phone company signal that prefixes the “this number is not in service” message. Have it start your answering machine message, and robo-caller software will flag your number as invalid.
it's spoofing your area code...
“They record the “yes,” which can be used in a court dispute as evidence of a binding oral contract. Just them saying you agreed holds no such evidentiary weight.”
Not true because the courts know those recording can be edited. The fact you gave them a credit card # is more evidence that you agreed.
I SHOULD BE ABLE BLOCK CALLS USING AN APP RIGHT ON MY CELL PHONE.
PLAINLY THERE ARE SOME NUMBERS THAT SHOULD NOT RING.
NEITHER VERIZON WIRELESS OR APPLE INTEND TO DO ANYTHING TO RESOLVE THIS ISSUE.
bump
I get these calls a lot- yesterday, I ended up hanging up on my supervisor two levels up (I was in an area where I couldn’t hear him well). Fortunately, he wasn’t upset about it.
I just got mrnumber and love it. I had hiya before and loved it, but lost it because of a bad SD card, and when I tried to get it back I wound up with some other app (I assumed that Hiya was gone or whatever) with very aggressive advertising. But mrnumber is great.
Opening with “I do not consent to recording” in a 2 party state is a must too...
Anyone who does business with a cell phone in the field.
No, Appy. True. They append your "yes" onto a canned statement intended to be a contract. It does NOT require a credit card, merely an agreement. The "yes" is enough to establish an oral contract if the conman establishes in his recording that both parties are entering a contract. You can challenge it in court but it is a higher bar to jump over because the burden of proof has shifted to YOU to prove you did not agree while they have evidence showing you did. In civil procedures the preponderance of the evidence wins. You are in the unenviable position of having to prove a negative, usually with only your unsupported word.
Note, these are usually NOT contracts based on credit card transactions because they can be challenged through your card issuer and reversed with a 90 day window of opportunity. These guys usually already know your bank account info and use ACH transfers. You have only 48 hours to find out about, challenge, and reverse those!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.