I’ve gotten this same voice mail several times in the past couple months. Always from a different (probably spoofed) number and a different person’s name, but the same message, word for word.
Hello, this is [name] calling you from the timeshare cancellation department. At the time of our last conversation you were exploring your options to legally and permanently exit your timeshare contract. It is urgent that we discuss your current options, as most resorts will be exercising what is considered a special assessment. This may legally obligate you to pay thousands in unexpected costs based on the current industry outlook.
Then they leave a number for me to call back. Obviously I’m supposed to think, “Oh Noes, I don’t even have a time share! There must be some mistake. I certainly don’t want to be legally obligated to pay thousands in unexpected costs!”
So let’s say I called them back. What would happen next? My first thought is something like “Just give me your name and social security number so I can look up your account and get this straightened out.” But is anybody really going to fall for that?
But what else could it be? Will they actually try to sell me a timeshare after I tell them I don’t own one? Seems like there’d be a low chance of this scam working either way.
They just want to find out if it is a live number, with a human being at the other end, which they find out by you calling back? Then they sell this information.
Could be both, if you give your Social security number that’s max profit, if it’s just a live number it’s micro profit.
The refund scam works like this: Several months after the purchase, someone might call to ask if you were happy with the service. When you say you weren’t, the scammer offers a refund.
Or the caller may say that the company is going out of business and providing refunds for “warranties” and other services.
In either case, the scammers eventually ask for a bank or credit card account number. Or they ask you to create a Western Union account. They might even ask for remote access to your computer to help you fill out the necessary forms. But instead of putting money in your account, the scammers withdraw money from your account.
Then why not just say, “If you have a time share and want to get out of it, call us”? Why make it sketchy by claiming we had a previous conversation that we didn’t?
I think my number has been sold so many times it must be worthless for further attempts to sell it. We get maybe 5 calls average every day, that we don’t pick up, that are obviously spoofed numbers. Oh well, getting up off the sofa to go see who’s calling is at least a little exercise.
that and they say " you called us" to get around the no call list
The home improvement people call and say "hi you discussed getting work done on your house with us a while back " and I say "you are mistaken because we don’t own the house " and they either just hang up or are shocked … and some ask if they could talk to our landlord
Same with car warranties and insurance people … we haven’t owned a car in 2 years … but yet weve had conversations with them supposedly
Not necessarily unsophisticated people, perhaps they are looking for people who are entering early stages of dementia and want to be the first to scam them out of their life savings. Call a thousand people and odds are the one who actually picks up the phone and talks to you is actually starting to lose their mind.
My mother was a directory assistance operator for a long time. She said some of the saddest calls were the ones on a holiday like Christmas from elderly people who had no one else to talk to, so they called directory assistance just to talk to another person. So I can well understand that some people would respond well to someone who is willing to talk to them, even if that person’s goal is scamming them.
It must work on enough people to keep that number active. Similar emails have been going around with the goal of getting people to call a toll-free number to say, “No, I didn’t order [such and such bit of technology] to be delivered to [completely fake address].”
Also, if you cold call enough people, you’re eventually going to call someone who actually has contacted their timeshare company about cancelling. Timeshares are notorious for giving people attempting to cancel them the runaround and making it virtually impossible to do so. So, to someone who has called their timeshare management company and tried to cancel, or someone who has called a timeshare cancellation service but hasn’t gotten out of the contract yet, this may well come across as a legitimate callback. Only now, they are being warned of thousands of dollars in additional fees that they may be liable for, but with the potential for options to get out. This kind of call might come across as not only a legitimate callback, but an urgent situation where they need to call back as soon as possible.
At which point, the “cancellation department” will need account information, and cancellation fees and penalties (which will be expensive but less than the “special assessment” fees which will be charged soon), and so on.
Since there’s effectively no marginal cost for these kinds of robocalls, even if there’s only a small population that’s vulnerable, a shotgun approach may well be cost-effective.
Yeah. The critical thing that’s hard to grok is that they can call all ~350 million phones in the USA for real close to $0.00. Just put the stolen botnet to work and the rest is easy and nearly free.
They only start to have real costs handling the callbacks they get. This makes the first step of any prospecting effort have very different economics from any kind of legit commerce we’re used to.
Thanks for the link. That’s what I thought it was.
And to repeat, it is a lot more expensive these days to create and maintain a list of active numbers than to just call every number. I think you still get a special tone or message if the number is inactive and if you cared you could use that to exclude numbers. But I doubt anyone cares.
If they didn’t luck out on a person with a time share, they will collect your name, number, and whatever other information they can get out of you. As said, that would be very valuable information to sell for the next scam, and very valuable since you are a person who actually responds to scam calls. If they call you using your name which they didn’t have before, you are more susceptible to fall for it.