Posted on 10/31/2002 5:56:28 PM PST by Texas Eagle
There's a lot you can do. Bounce back the charge on your credit card. Call your credit card company and tell them the charge is invalid and to remove it from your bill. They are required by FEDERAL LAW to remove the charge if you dispute it. They may give you a hard time, or try and talk you out of it (mine did the last time I bounced back a charge), but they are required to take it off. Just be firm and they'll remove it.
The merchant can't re-charge. They have to bill you directly or go to court to collet the money.
One of the up sides of this is that when a merchant has a lot of charge backs, they risk having their merchant accounts cancelled. It also costs them money each time there is a charge back against them.
Like the typical mafia boss that brags he's never been convicted.
You have a real up hill battle trying to defend telemarketing. While a small percentage of people (say 5%) may appreciate telemarketing or SPAM e-mail, for the other 95% of people, telemarketing calls and SPAM e-mail is something the can do without.
The reason I lumped telemarketing calls and SPAM e-mail together is to help you understand how most people feel about telemarketing calls. How do you feel about having your e-mail inbox clogged up with SPAM e-mail? That's how most people feel about telemarketing calls, and now you know how they feel about what you do.
P.S.
It took a lot of guts to admit here you were a telemarketer. I'm sure you're catching h***. But there's a reason for that.
It's exactly like e-mail. As soon as you voluntarily give your e-mail address to a business, you're doomed. As soon as you voluntarily give your home phone number to a corporation, your unlisted phone number status becomes worthless.
One way to really punish telemarketers is to go get a whistle, bullhorn, or some other very loud device. When they ask to speak to the person they're looking for, tell them "one moment please", and give it to them right in the eardrums.
I just hang up on them.
You shoulda asked her what color underwear she had on. That one always gets them.
I may be interested in talking to you about inbound order taking for me 24/7. I couldn't access your website.
Telemarketers may be relentless, exasperating, even unethical. But you have to give them this: They’re good. With the help of technology — everything from autodialing software to cheap overseas labor connected by fiber optics — they’ve turned phone solicitation into a $270 billion industry.
The key to the telephonic onslaught is predictive dialing, a breakthrough of the mid-’90s. These systems churn through huge databases of phone numbers, weeding out busy signals and out-of-service numbers, and routing answered calls to agents. They are mercilessly efficient: Out of an 8-hour day, agents can work the phones a staggering 7.2 hours. One loan company calling deadbeat borrowers boosted “promises to pay” by 129 percent.
The systems use a “pacing” algorithm to keep a steady flow of calls going, but there can still be a gap of three or more seconds between your “hello” and the telemarketer’s reply. That hiccup is critical — it’s when many people hang up, and it’s led California and Oklahoma to enact “dead line” laws that make it illegal to use predictive dialers that drop too many calls. More states are drafting similar laws, and soon dropped calls may be banned altogether.
Telemarketers want to cut down on hang-ups, too — they represent lost opportunities. That has driven them toward the latest advance in predictive dialing: IP-based systems. By converting from traditional circuit switches to digital packet switching, a center can increase its hits by as much as 35 percent. Agents don’t wait as long for connections, calls don’t get dropped, and the center halves its long-distance charges.
Eventually, machines may do all the talking. Avaya Inc. says its predictive dialing system is about 80 percent accurate in detecting a greeting message, bypassing the operator, and leaving a prerecorded sales pitch on the answering machines. Only one thing: Now some states are outlawing that, too.
How to Fight Back
Junk mail can be tossed and spam can be filtered, but telemarketing has always had a technological edge. At least until the TeleZapper. The device — AS SEEN ON TV! — promises to erase you from telemarketers’ lists and stop the unsolicited solicitations. And it works, at least until the industry devises a workaround. But why spend $50 for uninterrupted evenings? The fledgling Telemarketing Resistance has banded together online to help you do it for free. Just follow the steps below. — N.M.
1. Get the Audio
The TeleZapper fools telemarketers’ autodialing equipment by emitting the ascending three-note special-information tone you hear before, “We’re sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected.” You can download this tone from the Web. Do a Google search for “sit.wav” to find one of these audiofiles.
2. Chop It Down
Open sit.wav in an audio-editing program like Microsoft Sound Recorder. Edit out the second and third notes. (You don’t actually need those, and they’re sure to annoy family and friends.) Save the WAV file.
3. Press Record
Play that one note on your computer and record it as the first sound on your answering machine’s outgoing message. Follow with an oh-so-witty greeting.
4. Enjoy the Silence
Now sit back and screen those calls. Over time, telemarketers will get the “zapping” tone and take you off their lists.
- Neil McManus
Caller ID speaks for itself; however, MANY telemarketers buy old switches deliberately so the equipment cannot send the caller's name & number to your Call ID terminal.
So, all you see is, "Unidentified" or something like that, which, could be someone calling you from a shopping mall who needs to get in touch with you.
But, "Call Manager" will *answer* the "Inidentified" *or* "Blocked" calls & make that caller FIRST identify themselves, then, contact you to ask IF you want to *accept* the call. (~it's a totally automated service.)
If these are available, get 'em; about $8 extra p/mo.
Almost guarentees stopping telemarketing calls -- all telemarketing calls -- cold.
...doesn't get any sweeter than that.
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.