Today, I got a phone call and the person indicated I had ordered something. I told them I hadn’t ordered that particular thing, but he ignored what I said and went on to pitch said thing. I protested a couple more times and he just kept plowing through his pitch. I finally hung up. This is perhaps the second time I’ve received this type of call where they pretend you ordered something and then try to sell you on it and it certainly seems like a new version of previous attempts to sell something to you. I’m not sure whether it should be called a scam or just a new variation of a sales pitch. It’s definitely very annoying given they talk over your attempts to tell them to bug off. It’s like they’re a robot and don’t even hear you talking. I haven’t hung on long enough to get to the end so I don’t know how it’s supposed to ultimately go.
Hey, I got one of those calls yesterday too. At work, which leads me to suspect they’re just dialing random numbers. I was wondering if it was a robocall too – the voice just kept plowing through the pitch, no matter what I said. Eventually I just hung up.
Same crap they pull on businesses on printer cartridges and copier toner. That type they call a business and get some poor person to say ‘yes’ and give some sort of ID to the type of office equipment present, hopefully with some sort of serial number, then a package of seriously expensive toner or whatnot arrives with a bill - the poor person has more or less seemed to authorize the order.
If someone is calling you like that, tell them to take you off their call list, and hang up on them. Note the name of the person, time and date. When they call again, tell then you will be reporting them for violation of your states telemarketing regulations and hang up again.
There is no law saying you have to be polite to telemarketers, feel free to hang up on them as much as you like.
Most of the robo callers I’ve encountered (in the UK, YMMV) are Siri-style computer generated voices, and obviously artificial. Are there human-recorded variants with actual speech? That’s a whole new level of annoying!
It’s these guys, right?
That’s the one.
The article says “The Medical Alert System scam is in full swing in Michigan, according to the state Attorney General’s office, as well as in other states, including Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, Wisconsin and Kentucky.”
I can tell you that it’s going on in California, too. I’m in New York, but in the NY office of a California firm, and the call came in on a California line. Not from a California number, but to a California number that happens to ring on my desk in NY.
My mom (in Tennessee) is getting these calls a couple times a week. Every time they call her, she calls me. I told her it was a scam but she still calls to tell me they called her again. It was a scam the first time, it’s a scam the twentieth time. :smack: On one hand, it’s annoying that she calls me at work to tell me this; on the other hand, she knows not to ever give out information on the phone without consulting me, so I guess at least that much has sunk in.
Getting them here in Iowa, too. We have Caller ID, but they guys go ahead and leave messages in our voicemail. They are quite annoying - the guy really sounds like he’s “live,” even rustling pages at one point while he’s telling you how hard they’re trying to deliver this free medical alert system to your home.
Hitting “delete message” helps me feel better, though.
Yeah, I think that was the one this week. I don’t remember the subject of the previous one. The fact that it’s pre-recorded certainly explains why the caller doesn’t get ruffled by what I say (I yelled at the first guy).
This is why I still support Capital Punishment.
This.
I want a phone answering mochine with sophisticated call filtering capabilities, analogous to the filtering we can do with e-mails.
I want to be able to categorize incoming calls into “classes” according to their Caller-ID numbers or names, including recognition of calls from unknown numbers, and wild-card matches for portions of the number or name. So I could have various white-lists, various black-lists, various grey-lists, with various criteria for what calls go into which class, based on some kind of pattern-matching of the caller’s (alleged) number and name, or absence thereof.
I want to have several possible actions to define for incoming calls of each class, for example:
[ul]
[li] Ring my phone; take message if I don’t answer in [insert number] of rings.[/li][li] Don’t ring my phone; just immediately take a message.[/li][li] Pick up and immediately disconnect.[/li][li] Don’t even pick up. Just let it ring. (Without, y’know, actually ringing my phone.)[/li][li] Answer with automated voice saying: “Please press [digit] [digit] to complete your call.” If caller succeeds in doing this, take one defined action (probably, take a message). If caller fails, take a different defined action (probably, hang up). This filters out robocalls.[/li][li] Better still: Automated voice answers: “Please press the initial letters of the person you are trying to reach.” (With possibility to define several “right” answers.) If caller succeeds, take one defined action. If caller fails, take a different defined action. This filters out robocalls and also wrong number live callers, most commonly those shit-fucking non-stop debt collectors who are trying to get SWIM and they just won’t fucking quit! I want an option to send a high-voltage surge that will vaporize the caller’s electronics.[/li][/ul]
My mom was getting those calls everyday here in Ohio, and it was complicated by the fact that we had been discussing getting her a medical alert system. So she got really confused, but since she can’t see which buttons to push quick enough, she did no harm and now knows to just hang up. Oddly, the calls seem to have stopped…right after she fell and was on the floor for hours and ended up going to the nursing home for a rehab stay.
Bolding mine. Sorry to be pedantic, but you misspelled “genitals”.
Sort of on topic; We’ve been getting a lot of the calls where we hear: “Jim? Pick up Jim! It’s me. [slight delay] Pickup Jim! I need to talk to you.”
Is anyone else getting these? I don’t answer because I never answer the phone anyway, and if it was real they’d identify themselves.
Is your name Jim?
There is a scam that has hit around here. We have taken several reports on it. Someone calls on a scratchy phone line claiming to be a relative and saying they are kidnapped. You have to send money or they will be killed. Another variation is someone claims to be a relative and calls saying they are in a foreign country and their wallet has been stolen and they need money wired to get home. Usually the suspects have done enough research to known the names of relatives. Its not completely random.
Some of the news stories say this latest scam is targeting seniors, and I (60 yrs old) have to wonder whether they’ve somehow gotten ahold of a targeted list, of, say, AARP members …
I am getting this damn thing at least twice a day (frequently with one particular spoofed phone number, supposedly originating in my home state), and it’s almost giving me fond memories of Rachel of CS fame.
I have pretty much stopped picking up the landline unless I recognize the incoming number, and most robocalls do not go to my voice mail but this one does, dammit, and so I eventually have to take the time to erase the voice mails.
Genital electrocution sounds nifty but I vote for waterboarding of the main perpetrators and targeted droning of the call center. Let’s put the NSA’s spying, on the taxpayers’ dime, to good use.
Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid. We were getting those calls but neither of us is a senior.
Pressing 5 on two sequential calls did get them to stop.
Somewhere, perhaps even here, I read a warning that evil telemarketers will do unscrupulous awful things based on you simply saying the word “yes” so I make a point to never say it on these calls. I do it mainly as a mental exercise to entertain myself. It can be tough.
I try very hard not to be rude, but once they haven’t taken my third no for an answer I do hang up abruptly.
My mom is in the right demographic for the Medic Alert scam, but is not likely to encounter it directly. She doesn’t answer the phone unless it’s one of the three people she reluctantly talks to. Thank heaven for caller ID.
That sounds like the medical alert device scam. In this scam, it was said that the scammer tells the victim that a medical device has been paid for already and would be shipped to the victim’s address. But before that happens, the victim has to disclose personal information and credit card details to ‘confirm identity.’ But it’s a bluff and anybody who receives such a call should hang up and report it.
To raise a warning, I strongly suggest you report the scammer’s number to http://www.callercenter.com where most people go for scam updates and to the FTC in an attempt to shut the scam down.