There is a poll on the IMHO board asking who has received calls from Rachael at Card Holder Services, or similar calls.
It seems the FTC tried a crack down last November. Well, it hasn’t stopped the criminals. These folks are overdue for a pitting.
NY Times column - “The Haggler”
Seems like a consumer advocate / ombudsman type of thing.
I’ll forgive the columnist, David Segal, for referring to himself in the third person.
He tried chasing down the criminals. As best he could tell they were:
Brenda and Tony Helfenstine of Florida.
After describing his investigative steps, Segal gives the Florida agencies that didn’t seem to care enough to shut these folks down:
I haven’t heard from “Rachael” in a while, maybe she has gone the way of the dodo bird.
Perhaps if I bother to stay on the line and press 1 and then ask where they are, I’ll get that click and be (finally!!) taken off their list.
(Of course, there may be many of these scammers and they may be sharing calling lists and even robocall recordings so Rachael may not be permanently dead and I might always be bothered.)
The FTC might have done some good. I used to get five or six calls a week, mainly at dinner time, now it’s one or two.
Might as well pit Beelzebub himself. Man, there’s some things I’d like to do to ol’ Rachel.
Strip her naked…
Tie her down to a bed…
Pull all the shades…
Turn the lights down low… no, wait, turn 'em up to runway brightness.
And put on a recording of me assuring her that this is just a courtesy call and there’s no problem with her current situation, to repeat until the last nuclear plant runs out of fuel.
I pit the US Congress for not hiring an army of lawyers and diplomats to deal with these crooks. Ditto for the spammers, email scammers and bona fide identity nabbers. We need the stimulus anyway.
Meh. We have a phone number. Use a reverse directory lookup and you can get a street address. Given that, you can go there and subject them to any sort of “punishment” you like. Waterboard 'em! Burn 'em at the stake! Rape Rachel! Your choice. Have a party!
[Moderating]
I’ve edited the OP to remove the address and phone numbers of the scammers in question. BigAppleBucky, please don’t post people’s real life contact information on the boards.
[/Moderating]
OK, but I was thinking their criminal behavior combined with the fact that the link had the names/numbers would have made preserving their privacy here a non-issue.
Just got another call this afternoon from the 410 area code, but caller ID had it as “credit card services”. Didn’t pick up and they, of course, left no message.
Every time I’ve gotten a call from Rachael, Heather, or one of the other stableful, the number from Caller ID is spoofed. I’ve tried calling them back once or twice and it’s always a disconnected number.
Sorry to bring back a zombie thread, but here is a link to a site that claims to be gathering petitions to phone companies to stop this nonsense.
Consumers Union.
My current phone provider, Optimum, allows me to block 32 spoofed phone numbers. After that I’m on my own. Reading their competitor’s (Verizon) website I see they allow 5 free blocked numbers. Not sure how much it costs to block the 6th through 999th number and whether it’s actually possible to block that many.
Aside from the credit card scam I’ve been getting a scam call from “The National Center for Aging” offering all sorts of goodies if I sign up.
Optimum was unhelpful about expanding the 32 limitation on blocked numbers. Their only suggestion was for me to run away and change my phone number.
Many of those numbers were probably used only once. If there was any way you could access a tally of each, and delete the least used ones, that would make space. Or you could just wipe them all out and start fresh.
BTW, Rachel is now Carmen, of Cardholder Services. Just for shits & giggles, I have been trying to see how long I can keep them on the line by pretending to be a potential victim, but the following lines all have resulted in an instant hangup:
“Where is your office?”
“Can I speak to Rachel? She’s an old friend.”
“How does the ‘reduce my interest rate’ thing work?”
“Would you like my Visa card number?” (I guess that sounds too easy.)
I usually pretend to be a somewhat senile old coot – that provides the best combination of excuses to waste time and incentive for the scammer to keep trying.
