I got one of those telemarketing calls that ends with “If you no longer wish to be contacted, please press 1 now” calls today, on my cell phone. And they left a callback number.
Did you know that you can register a complaint online, if you have a phone number or the name of the business that violates the Do Not Call list? I didn’t…I had gone to the DNC site to make sure that I had, indeed, registered this number.
This is mundane, but I don’t think it’s pointless, and I felt the need to share.
I have reported two different businesses in the past month there. Both had been calling regularly. One to tell me that my warranty was up on my car (really? My 12 year old car with 190K miles on it is out of warranty?) and the other to sell me something to do with my mortgage.
After reporting both twice I stopped getting calls. I don’t know if it is because they were reported so many times that they government took action or if it was because they moved on, but I no longer hear from them.
When it comes to the auto warranty calls, the FTC is on the case:
Wow, 30K reports is a lot. I wonder what the reporting percentage is. I am only going to guess, but I’ll bet is less than 1%.
Yeah, the vast majority of people just hang up, and don’t do anything about it. Those telemarketers must have been really busy!
I have been getting these calls every day. Little old me, who has never had a license or a car in her life. I either tell them I’m legally blind and do not want to be harrased in this way as it is against the Americans with disabilities act and I am going to sue, or I go on and on about my 1934 Stutzcat convertible.
I’ve been getting the automated car insurance calls multiple times a week since ~2003 (with occasional odd lapses where they suddenly won’t call for a few months), and I’m surprised that only in the last year or so have I been hearing complaints from others about them. When did everyone else begin receiving them? (I’ve noticed a sudden surge in the automated “Credit Card Services” calls recently that might be related; I got them weekly from 1999 to 2004 or so, and occasionally since, but began getting them daily again a few weeks ago.)
I sleep days and keep both my landline and cell ringers off, so I’m not hugely inconvenienced by these calls, but it’s slightly annoying to have to clear my voice mail and answering machine out. I’ve never spoken with a live representative, have no idea what the company’s name is, and have never had a proper phone number to report the harassment; it was blocked in years past, and is a spoofed number now. A shame, because since joining the Indiana DNCR when it was first launched, I’ve happily reported bothersome calls when I’ve been able.
I’d been getting tons of these warranty calls, but about two weeks back they stopped. Maybe this explains it.
I;d hung up most of the time, but when I did “Press one to talk to an operator” so that I could complain, I’d have the phone operator simply hang up on me.
I was getting those warranty calls AT WORK. Every time they called, it was “the second and final time” they would be reminding me about my warranty.
I finally got a live human on the line, told him it was about the seventeenth time they’d called for the “second and final time” and that they were calling my work and to knock it off. The guy meekly agreed to remove my number and I haven’t heard from them since.
Oh, they know that they’re operating outside the law, they just don’t care. And it’s not like the operators can really do anything, because I think most of the companies that are doing this are just wardialing, they don’t even have a list.
I was just amazed that they left me a callback number. THAT’LL teach them to leave me such a thing.
The few junk calls I get on my cell phone are clearly coming from outside the U.S. They don’t care about the law, either, since they’re effectively untouchable.