I finally got around to checking my UVerse voice mail. I don’t pay much attention to this landline. It’s just part of my UVerse package. High speed Internet is what matters.
I had 50 voice messages dating back 10 months (last Nov).
Nearly all that I’ve reviewed are hang ups. No message. I’m pretty sure it’s phone Spammers. So far I haven’t found a saved message from any of them.
I found a handful of voice messages from various places. But most people or companies that matter have my cell number.
I’m thankful my voice mailbox isn’t filled by spammers. It would make reviewing & deleting more time consuming.
Why do phone Spammers rarely leave voice messages?
It’s a matter of poor returns. Spammers get many rejections when people do pick up; I’m sure they have even fewer responses to voice mail messages. People are getting pretty tired of this bullshit.
And then there are non-spammers who haven’t learned to use voice mail or don’t want to. I have friends who never leave messages, ever, even if I ask them to. They find out that I often return their calls anyway, since I see their number on the CID list, so why bother?
A lot of the spammers are using a spoofed phone number anyway, so you can’t call them back if you wanted to. So, what would the message be? “Hey, we called, and we might call again sometime so pick up the phone the next time you see an unfamiliar number”?
a lot of the health insurance ones do …united health care leaves a 2-3 minute sales pitch twice a month on the phone so does kaiser atena (its medicare plan changing season ) and others
and i do have a couple of hilariously bad English robocalls form the "united states IRS o"r “the social security”
I dropped caller ID on my landline 20 years ago and stopped answering it, letting everything go to the machine. I still get upwards of a half dozen hangups with no message EVERY day.
Lucky me, such hang-ups don’t get saved as messages by my VM system.
Why don’t spammers leave voice messages? If it’s a human telemarketer, I’m sure they’re trained not to, and with good reason. If they took the time to leave a message after just about every call (probably 80-90% of calls these days), they’d spend hours per day leaving messages, that NOBODY WOULD EVER RETURN.
Alternatively, they could just drop the call and try to reach the next person. Their “productivity” would go up 5x; they may reach more people who actually pick up, more people actually responding to their message, more people sending $, etc.
(I have only responded to one telemarketer’s offer. This one I couldn’t refuse: Discount subscription of season tickets to the local orchestra. Rare case of excess money, time and interest overlapping. Won’t happen again.)
The person making the call has an advantage.
The person answering the call is at a disadvantage.
They want you to answer, so they can launch into their sales pitch, which is designed to put them in control of the conversation.
If you call them, they lose a few moments trying to figure out who you are, what you want, and how they need to respond. They might have a list of pre-planned responses, but it cannot possibly be comprehensive.
Besides, few people will call back. (I certainly don’t.) The time spent on a voice message would be better spent giving the sales pitch to an easier mark.
Even though robocalls are very cheap, they cost something. I expect that the gains from leaving a voicemail are below even the $0.0001 a minute or whatever they’re spending to access the telephone system.
I get a fair number of those, but they’re usually under 20 seconds. Their software must think that I answered because the recording I receive usually starts at “…for more information press 1…” so it clearly started “talking” while my voicemail greeting was playing.
“It’s unfortunate that you weren’t home for me to aggravate you with yet another of what I’m sure are many daily spam calls, but today is your lucky day! I’m going to leave this message so that you have an opportunity to rectify that!”
I get the opposite - spam callers that manage to leave messages on my cell without ever actually making the phone ring. I’m not sure how it’s done, but there it is.
The ones that really confuse me are the ones that aren’t there when I do actually answer the phone. The number of people that answer spam calls must be really small, and yet I rarely get an actual person when I pick up. Inconceivable!
Telemarketers don’t want their staff sitting around checking their facebook feeds waiting for somebody to answer the phone. They would like them to spend 100% of their time pitching to a mark. Since only a small percentage of phone calls will be answered by an actual human, they have a predictive dialing system placing dozens of phone calls simultaneously for each telemarketer who is working. If the dialing system detects a human answered the phone, the call is switched to any available telemarketer.
Often, more people than anticipated answer the phone or the telemarketers take longer talking to the previous suckers than the algorithm predicts and there is nobody available to talk to you. So it hangs up on you. The dialing system can be adjusted for fewer hangups, but that means more telemarketers will be sitting around without anyone to talk to and the telemarketing companies consider their time to be more valuable than yours. So the scummier the caller, the more likely you are to get hung up on.
If they left a message on your phone, they presumably would want you to call them back. To accept calls they would have to maintain an incoming call infrastructure and employ a staff to accept incoming calls. Heather (“There is no problem with your credit card account”) doesn’t feel that enough people would actually call back to justify the expense.
The people who call you are not dialing calls on individual phone lines where they can receive calls. They are working on assembly-line operations designed to place non-stop outgoing calls and keep the people talking to suckers as close to 100% of the time as humanly possible.
Nearly every voicemail I get now is 1) scammer, and 2) starts mid-sentence, and clearly has started playing its message as soon as the voicemail greeting answered the line.
The very few messages left on my phone are from robocalls and tapes, not from people. The last was the Social Security scam which left a number. No person has ever left a message, though. They usually hang up at the beep of the answering machine.