Cancer, veterans, police and firefighter “charities” are major users of “dynamic” robo-callers as well as notorious fraudsters. These sound quite
human, but are actually a computer playing back prerecorded phrases. They have a crude parser which decides what phrase to play next. If you make typical answers, you can be fooled into thinking you are talking to a human. This may have been what you were talking to.
Slightly older technology handed you off to a human closer at the appropriate time. The latest tech bypasses humans altogether and is able to hear a credit card number, verify it, and complete the call.
One way to test this is to give an unusual response that the parser isn’t likely to have in its recognition database, like “Did you have lunch today?” If the response is something like, “I’m having a hard time understanding you, there must be static on the line. Could you repeat that?” or “I’ll call back later”, you can be pretty sure you aren’t talking to a human.
Hmm, that might explain why it always takes three tries for them to accept my calm and completely unvarying “I do not engage in charitable donations.” - they just pause and then continue with their scripted spiel asking for the next lower amount.
That said, I made the critical mistake of actually donating to a police drive (or at least they claimed to be a police drive) one time fourteen years ago, and every single one of the spam calls I get are (supposedly) the police begging for more. So I thought it was at least plausible that I was on a very specific list of people who donated to police.
Yep. Mine consist of Microsoft scammers, car warranties, urgent news about my chronic pain (I have none), my Wells Fargo credit card (also don’t have), and student loan forgiveness (ditto). I don’t even answer my landline 99% of the time.
I get a pretty much even split among four types of calls: out-and-out scams (e.g. Windows Technical Support), things like warranty / air duct cleaning, requests for donations (police groups tend to do this a lot), and political surveys. One thing I used to do with surveys is, I would ask right off the bat, “Who is paying for this survey?”, and if they refuse to answer, then I hang up.
Minor disagreement - I think the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross were engaging in a scam. Yeah, they were selling land that existed, but it was nothing like what they described.
Similar for the “You already won a car, a vacation, or a coupon” - if everyone who listens to the sales pitch gets the coupon.
I would agree there. Glengarry Glen Ross was absolutely a scam. Timeshare stuff I would say is not but YMMV.
I don’t think most phone sales people are in that situation, but my sample size is absolutely skewed because I know these people via professional organizations and so there is a self selection bias. Now, some of them sell what I consider to be inferior products. For example, if you buy life insurance over the phone you will get a real honest to goodness life insurance policy, but it will probably be overpriced, usually significantly. Or I know a guy who sells who’s who over the phone (for real) and does well. But who’s who is sort of junk when you come right down to it. Or someone selling magazine subscriptions. You are going to get your magazines. Will you need them? Will you be able to stop them? Maybe maybe not. But they will be as advertised. These are not scams, just useless or low quality. I think the number of people doing Glen Garry stuff is pretty low these days due to all the crackdowns on telephone solicitation in the last 20 years.
Those robot calls mentioned earlier are fully illegal in most (not all) states. That’s pretty recent, but it’s the type of thing that happens.This doesn’t mean they don’t happen, but if they get caught it’s huge multi million dollar fines.
The one genuine exception to this is the group of guys I know selling Medicare Supplements this way who genuinely know their stuff and do well for people consistently. That is genuinely rare.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as an unsolicited phone call. I was called by my car insurance company. I called back after checking to make sure it really was my car insurance company. I was able to get my rate lowered by answering a couple questions. I didn’t initiate the call, but it was my existing car insurance company.
Absolutely there are a lot of the extended-warranty-for-your-car calls that are just plain scams. How do I know? Because I’ve gotten a lot of them, and I’ve never even owned a car.
After a couple rings I picked up the phone (despite the caller ID indicating it was from the 303 area code, nowhere near me). I said “hello” and following a brief pause for the recording to kick in, an enthusiastic voice said "Hi, I’m Chris __ and I’ve got
REPLACES RECEIVER, NONE TOO GENTLY
Did I miss out on a great job opening, an unbeatable time share offer, incredibly cheap lab supplies, a new puppy…? :smack:
Your theory breaks down when I tell you that I have never donated to police or fire “charities”, yet I get the same “begging for more” calls. If they used “specific” lists, I would be the very least likely to get called. Yet I get (probably) as many calls as you do.
Therefore, I doubt if such lists are that common. The only lists they need are lists of valid phone numbers, i.e., all of them.
Scam calls are getting damn sneaky. Or at least confusing. Just today my phone rang and I looked and my screen said “General Motors” and it had a local number similar to my own. Now, I had a suspicion that it was a spammer but when I answered it was a recording telling me this was the final attempt to reach me regarding my student loans. Well, considering that I don’t have a GM car and I have no student loans, I think it was safe to say it was a scam. Lol
To be brutally fair, that doesn’t mean that the offers are scams, just that they are blind, cold calls. But if the caller takes extra pains to conceal the company’s name and address, uses a fake CID, fraudulently pretends to know about your car, and cold-calls people on the DNC list, it casts doubt on the legitimacy of the insurer. Do you really want to trust such deceivers with your warranty business? If they are hard to find now, think of how easy they will be to find if you ever have a claim!
Well, the odd thing is that, aside from the odd survey, the only unsolicited calls I get are (alleged) police fund drives. Which makes me wonder if perhaps I’m getting calls by actual cops, just because if my number was in the hands of scammers I’d get more than one kind of call.
