Telemarketers are bad enough, but at least now I can tell them to take me off the list. DNC seems to work fairly well, for the legitemate businesses that used to call me. I don’t even get grumpy with them.
Scam caller, would you like to lower your cc rates. Used to be a live caller who, when I asked to be removed from the list, would hang up on me before I finished the sentence.
Did manage to cuss her out once.
Now it is the same voice calling, with a recording.
Every day sometimes more than once. Of course the Phony number comes up on caller ID.
I just hope that with changing our phone service, the call blocking feature will work on these things.
I know I can’t do anything about those charity or polling calls other than to ask them not to call. Usually winds up being a recording too.
So, do you still have this kinda problem even on the DNC list? Have you found a way to dissuade this scam from calling you?
My husband is getting the same calls on his cell phone. The area code is 506, which is New Brunswick, Canada. Maybe the DNC list doesn’t apply to them? What’s the area code on your calls?
There’s no way to get rid of them as far as I can tell. I actually wrote my first letter to my congressperson to complain about it and didn’t receive a response. There are numerous websites where people are bitching about it, but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. What makes it even worse is that the war dialer systems don’t even work right. Usually the touch tone menu will not bring you to a live operator and instead just hang up. If you are trying to scam someone, you should at least invest in a decent war dialer. Every 10 calls or so, I’ll go ahead and work my way through the menu and get a human. I’ll then scream at the top of my lungs, “FUCK OFF ASSHOLE”. Yeah, it’s ineffective, but it makes me feel better.
One of the problems with this particular scammer is the Phony CID generator, gives different numbers. One of the area codes is 202 I think. I tried to look it up once. It didn’t exist. If I can block enough of the fakes, maybe I could put them down to once a week or less.
Lately I’ve been getting calls which according to my caller ID are coming from International Gateway, which according to Google is apparently a travel agency. I suspect that they’re calling to tell me that I’ve won a free trip to somewhere, if I’m willing to listen to a sales pitch for either a timeshare or some sort of resort plan. But I’ll never know, because I never pick up the phone and of course they never leave a message. I’m on the DNC call list, of course, having signed up right after I got my new phone number and was getting two or three calls a day from telemarketers.
Unlisted comes up as unknown on caller id.
Fake number comes up with 000-000-0000 and many other combinations . Usually if it has actual numbers the area code goes nowhere. They use some sort of generator that reports a fake number to the caller id system, so that number shows up on your caller id.
It is possible my 202 is from political polls I had a rash of them as well during the past summer.
I keep getting calls from the NRA that I strongly assume are not actually from the NRA. I have no business relationship with them, and they never leave a message.
I keep getting calls from people who want me to renew the warranty for my car. I haven’t owned a car in a year and a half. When I did own a car it was a used Mazda that was several years old when I bought it. I have never had a warranty on a car, ever. Yet they call me twice a week from a different number every time and when I push 2 to be removed from their list it just hangs up. When I connect to a person and tell them to stop calling me they just hang up. I registered on the Do Not Call list but apparently they got my number from some contest I entered or something and by filling out whatever form I filled out I agreed that I wanted to receive calls from them.
Yeah, those calls are definitely not targeted towards car owners, they just call everyone. Same with the “We are calling from your bank, don’t be alarmed but we can lower your interest rate” type recorded calls.
They claim to be Clark Financial Services, and I am sorely tempted to do the police whistle down the phone line to those bastards. I have been called four times in the last five days, and they ignore my “Do Not Call” responses.
It seems our local phone company is stumped. I received a call a few months ago and the caller ID spelled out THIS IS A SCAM. I can only assume there were enough complaints from the same fake number that they programmed their equipment to display the message.
Being that I know they are 100% a scam, I don’t yell at them because I’m sure they’re used to that. I just try to take up as much time as possible. Put them on speaker phone and go about your business while trying to sound as interested as possible.
A few years ago my mother in law got a call from a woman who was sobbing hysterically on the phone and identified herself as my wife, crying out “Ma! Ma!” Though she was naturally scared that something was happening to her daughter, fortunately my mother in law had the presence of mind to pay close attention to the voice and realized that it was a stranger, not my wife, and she quickly hung up.
She had remembered stories going around of gangsters getting young girls to call up people pretending that they were their adult children, that they had been kidnapped, and would plead with these terrified senior citizens to go out and wire money to a certain account right away.
I keep getting calls from people trying to get me to work part time from home. I know they are scams, but even if some of them are not scams, I have no interest in getting these calls. I am on the Do Not Call list. But apparently Someone got my name & number at some point and keeps passing it around.
Many of the numbers are real numbers and my VOIP phone service allows me to block calls by entering a number. However, some numbers are not real numbers, e.g. 200-000-0030, and my blocking service can’t do anything with these numbers.
Do VOP phone companies have the same rules for caller ID as traditional phone companies?
The problem with the Do Not Call list is it allows you to be put back on the list as soon as you do business with a company such as buy a product. They are free to solicit you as well.
Then you have to tell them again, I bought from you but take me off your list.
The only real way to handle this is get a Google Voice number, change your real phone number and never give that one out. Then give your GV number to companies. You can forward your GV numnber to your real number
I was at the Laundromat this afternoon, and when I got home, my 11YO daughter was very excited, telling me about a call that had come through from a guy saying that I’d won a $100.00 gift card from Target! I asked her what the Caller ID said, and she replied “Unknown Caller”, but he was going to call back in about an hour to talk to me. She was hyped.
Well, when he called back, she answered the phone (I don’t answer if the caller ID says “Unknown Caller”) and passed it to me. She had mentioned that the guy sounded “African”. Well, he didn’t sound African, he did sound maybe Indian, even though he said he was calling from Phoenix, AZ, and all her wanted to do was to send me my gift card. He then proceeded to ‘verify’ my address (which was very, very wrong) and to tell me there would be a $1.00 processing fee, but I wouldn’t have to pay the fee until after I’d received my ‘Free Gift’. THEN he wanted me to give him my credit card info.
Uh, sorry. How stupid do I sound? I mean, I know this is WV, and we have a reputation and all, but seriously? I’m going to give some dude out of nowhere my credit card information? (But he wasn’t just ‘some dude out of nowhere’ he gave me his ‘employee ID number’ and the name of the company he works for! Should have soothed me right there).
After asking for my credit card info, I said to him (very clearly) “I’m going to hang up on you now” and hung up on him. He (or someone from the same number) proceeded to call me back three times in the next ten minutes. I didn’t answer.
Grrrrr, I wish there was a way to block all calls where the caller ID says “Unknown Caller”.
I get on average 1 call every week or two, from a different number each time, which has a recording in Spanish. I usually just hang up on it as I don’t speak Spanish. One time I let it go all the way through its speil, and at the end, it simply hung up. I was hoping for a person to tell to take me off their list (I am on Do Not Call). I can’t figure out what the hell that is. It’s been going on for well over a year. What in the heck could it be trying to communicate? One of these days I’ll get the call when I’m near one of my Spanish speaking friends.
A variant on that is quite common right now in Indonesia. They tell you that your spouse or your child was in an accident and you have to bring money for the hospital fees right away. (A more or less believable pretense given the way things work here.)
I just got one of those and it was actually pretty funny how clumsy the attempt was - first the caller asked for an Indonesian who used to have our number. When I told him in my accented Indonesian that Ibu Siti does not live in our house, he realized he had a foreigner on the line. He switched gears and told me in English that it was the police calling to tell me my husband had been in a car accident. But then he asked me “what is your husband’s name”? Riiiigght.
I had fun screaming at the guy in two languages. He hung up first.
