Does the nationwide do-not-call registry apply to foreign companies? How about American companies who hire foreign companies to do their telephone solicitations?
For some reason, somebody out there thinks my home phone number is a business phone. About twice a month, I get calls from some “yellow pages” who wants to put my business in their directory (and, presumably buy an ad as well). The person sounds as if he comes from India. I don’t know the full spiel because I hang up as soon as I hear “yellow pages”.
Now, I assume that this directory will be distributed here in the USA and not in India. I therefor assume that some American company hired these people to do their cold-calling for them. What’s the SD here?
My spouse got hundreds of calls from a Canadian phishing operation over a period of six months. AT&T customer service said there was nothing she could do about it and there are websites dedicated to bitching about this particular operation which would seem to indicate they can call the US with impunity.
As the OP … The original posting was due to a spam phone call I received this AM from a Georgia phone number in the caller-id.
When I received a 2nd call from that same number this afternoon, I googled the number. It was to a Lawn service company in Savannah. So I called the number back. It was “disconnected”. I then googled the lawn service, by name, and up popped a different number.
What I assume is that the poor lawn service company had it’s phone number hijacked. They changed numbers when they started receiving a plethora of angry callers (like me). I only received 2 spam calls because of these guys. The lawn service probably received thousands.
There are all kinds of ways out there to “spoof” what shows up on caller ID. Probably instead of “hijacking” it in some way, the spammers just picked a phone number that wouldn’t track back to them and programmed it in to show on people’s caller ID.
I got a call the other night that came up as a cellular phone call. Normally I don’t answer for numbers that I don’t know, but my husband bugged me to do it - immediately I got a recording babbling something about first-time home buyer credits. Unless someone’s programming a smart phone to do this, I’m betting on a caller ID spoof.