Four, count 'em four, phone calls inside two hours.
“Hi, I’m from the Federal Grants department…”
“Hi, I’m from the Security for your computer…”
And two with a robot/recorded voice, “Hi, um, I’m Amy, to help you find a job…”
This latter bugs me the most, because…well, it fooled me the first time. I thought I was talking to a real person. Also, once you go through the whole song and dance, they just try to sign you up for a student loan. Nothing to do with employment at all.
Bassards. Pure fucking bassards. May they be trapped at their phone banks forever, being hung up on, hung up on, hung up on, till the end of time.
I once got spam email that was actually from “fishing.com.” I am not making that up. Spelled that way.
The thing that pissed me off the most was that right after my husband joined the military, we got a bunch of phone calls from places trying to sell us “Girls Gone Wild,” and similar types of videos.
Now, I’m not saying my husband has never done anything that would get us on a porn list, but I know his tastes, and “Girls Gone Wild” is not it. Besides, he would never pay for porn when we had the internet.
And I don’t think the USAR has an official policy of selling it’s phone list of new recruits to pornographers. I’m saying some shmuck PFC at MEPS cribbed phone lists and sold them on his own.
I once signed up for what I thought was an online employment agency, gave my personal information, a resume, and answered a lengthy questionnaire. At every chance I indicated I was only seeking employment at the time, not looking to further my education. Literally less than **half an hour **later I got a call from them trying to hook me up online education from places I’d never heard off. The more I tried to emphasize I was interested in employment the harder sell he gave me. I didn’t bite, and never heard back from them other than spam emails. Being unemployed & desperate sucks.
I don’t even answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize anymore. If it is important, they can leave a voicemail. But I hate the tapes even worse than the people, since I can’t curse out the tapes.
“This is the IRS calling to notify you that your file has been referred to the legal department for action against you. Please call 318-403-… immediately to resolve the issue.”
If a person calls with a thiiiiiiiick Indian accent calls and claims to be Steve Swanson from the Microsoft Windows, you should either hang up and not waste your time, or entertain him and waste his time.
According to a robocall I’ve received twice on my landline, I’m about to be arrested for tax fraud on behalf of the Canada Revenue Agency. However, when I call the provided number (Kingston Ontario area code) I don’t get through and don’t even hear ringing. How can I have fun with fraudsters if the only provided phone number is bogus? These criminals are just lame.
Not exactly a scam, but in the employment section of free Toronto newspapers, there are almost no job ads. There might be ads for having medical research done on you, and there will be ads for people in debt and ads for schooling, but very few jobs.
Nomorobo is your friend, assuming they work with your provider. They work just fine with Verizon Fios home phone, not with Verizon Wireless.
I don’t even look at the home phone until it’s rung at least twice. My cell, on the other hand: if it is a number I don’t recognize, I ignore it until it stops ringing. Then I added it to my “Telemarketers” contact (which has hundreds of entries by now) and it never rings from them again.
I one called the IRS scammers back just for giggles. An Indian accent answered with “Department of Treasury, how may I help you?”. They had a pretty well-planned setup actually - most scammers, if you call back, you get a dead number.
They never say Microsoft to me, they say Windows Company. Next time I pick up a call and it’s them I’m going to ask for a quote on some windows, and not stop until they hang up. However, I’ve found that saying things about their mothers make them really mad.
Sometimes when he says his name is John, I say my name is Rajiv.
You know how when you get a telemarketer call, and you say “Hello?” and there is a pause as you get connected to a marketer, who then says “Hello?” like you’re the one who called them, so you have to say “Hello?” again?
Has anyone gotten one of those guys who then goes “Ha ha, oh sorry I dropped my phone, I didn’t know if you’d picked up.”? I’ve gotten two of those.
Next time I am going to say something like “For gods sake, man! The only two skills you need to be a fracking telemarketer are talking and holding a phone, you can’t even manage that?”
I read somewhere that the “Hello?” you get from them is a deliberate tactic: they do a bit of acting, portraying someone annoyed that you have bothered them—and as a result, you (supposedly) will become eager to please this person you’ve annoyed. Whereas if they were courteous and sounded eager to please you, you’d be less likely to try to please them.
I’m not quite sure where I read that, or how to search the topic, but ever since reading it I’ve noticed how often that tactic is used. Certainly there isn’t any legitimate reason for a telemarketer to sound annoyed that someone has responded to their call (as getting responses enhances their pay and/or job status).
Most likely you were not talking to a person, but a computer with stored, standard responses and a program that decides which one to play back next.
The first delay is so their computer can detect if you are a machine or voice mail. If it detects “hello?” or something sufficiently short, the call then goes to the next step in the program, which usually begins with some reasonably-sounding excuse as to why there was a delay. “Ha, ha, I dropped the phone” is one of these phrases, which is why you heard it twice.
This is followed by a Liza-style dialogue, typically asking you questions that can be answered yes or no, because the voice recognition software is good enough to parse that, but not good enough to understand what “yes, sure, certainly, y’bet” means. Only when the computer gets to the closing does the sucker get transferred to a human to take your money.
If you hang up before the conversation gets very far, you may not be aware that you have been talking to a robot instead of a person. To test this, try saying something that a person would be able to handle, but not a robot (this is a mini-Turing test), like “Is it raining where you are?” or “Once upon a time, there were three bears.” A stock, recorded response is “I am having trouble understanding you. Could you repeat that?” or maybe “Sorry to have bothered you,” and hangs up.
As far as Liza routines go, these are pretty primitive, but they allow the scamsters to make millions of calls without paying wages.
Ha ha. I love this. It reminds me of the old “The food here is terrible!” “I know, and such small portions!” routine.
“It’s not that I’m offended by porn. It’s just such crappy porn! And how insulting that they think we don’t know about all the good free porn out there!”
Well, maybe. But I’ve been on many, many calls in which it was obvious that the responses to my input were recorded. If software exists that makes the robot non-obvious, why wouldn’t all companies that transact business by phone use that software?
Sherrerd: That’s a mighty good question. The software definitely exists, and it’s good enough to have fooled me the first time.
I can’t imagine that it’s more expensive than a boiler-room of real people, even if they are sub-minimum-wage foreign labor. Software development isn’t exactly cheap, but it’s not all that pricey. Plus, models exist, so developers could just copy existing scripts.
I believe some jurisdictions have laws against robot calls, although I’m not clear on this. I thought California was one of those jurisdictions, but, damn, I get a lot of robot calls!