Posted on 09/16/2012 8:22:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
So much for silence from telemarketers at the cherished dinner hour, or any other hour of the day.
Complaints to the government are up sharply about unwanted phone solicitations, raising questions about how well the federal "do-not-call" registry is working. The biggest category of complaint: those annoying prerecorded pitches called robocalls that hawk everything from lower credit card interest rates to new windows for your home.
Robert Madison, 43, of Shawnee, Kan., says he gets automated calls almost daily from "Ann, with credit services," offering to lower his interest rates.
"I am completely fed up," Madison said in an interview. "I've repeatedly asked them to take me off their call list." When he challenges their right to call, the solicitors become combative, he said. "There's just nothing that they won't do."
Madison, who works for a software company, says his phone number has been on the do-not-call list for years. Since he hasn't made any progress getting "Ann" to stop calling, Madison has started to file complaints about her to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the list.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Something is going on, and has been going on for a long time, with Macy’s. We are unlisted, on the do not call list and don’t even have a Macy’s card. They keep calling, we don’t answer but looking up the number I find this is one of those that disguises itself and shows up as from Mason, Ohio. They insist that you have a credit balance and offer to let you pay it with another credit card. Sometimes it is a collection agency in India for Macy’s.
They call FREQUENTLY and it can’t be blocked by the AT&T blocking feature since it is not a local number.
“has started to file complaints about her to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the list”
I file AT LEAST three a week. It does no good. It takes them weeks to reply with a standard form letter.
You can file a complaint here...
https://complaints.donotcall.gov/Mobile/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx?panel=2
I don't think it is against the law. We have Brighthouse digital phone here in the Tampa Bay area, and we can block up to 10 (I think) numbers. We had two numbers that were calling us every 30 minutes this summer, and we blocked those two.
We also have the caller ID that pops up on the TV screen when our home phone rings. For our cells, and our home phone, we never, ever answer a call where we don't recognize the caller or the number. Ever.
I would say 90% of the unknown numbers don't leave a message, and of the other 10%, nearly all are telemarketers.
I went to that page...I wonder if this is why there has been an increase in calls within the last year.
At the bottom of page...
OMB 3084-0047
Expires December 31, 2011
This voluntary complaint form is designed to improve public access to the FTC Do-Not-Call Complaint Registry. The estimated time of completion is 2.5 minutes. Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, as amended, an agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a valid OMB control number. The OMB control number for this collection is 3084-0047.
The callers are just workers. Who is making money with this?
That’s who needs to be skewered.
We get several /day. It’s the phone ringing that annoys me. At dinner, evenings, Sunday.
The frequency picked up after I renewed our Do Not Call
.
That’s pretty good.
If I answer and hear the beginning of the Credit Services speel I hit and hold the # key which I heard tells their calling computer this is a fax number. After a few times, no more calls.
Nothing will get them to stop.
I’ve been told that you can record the tones for a disconnected number onto your anwering machine. It tells robocallers that your number doesn’t exist, but a human will continue listening and hear your message.
Mr. Police Whistle is great! I used to get calls every few minutes from some guy with a thick accent claiming he was from UPS and had a $250,000 check waiting for me. This guy was creepy and relentless, I had to unplug the phone several times just to get some peace. Then Mr. Police Whistle came into my life, and Mr. Nigerian Creepazoid never called again :)
I still have one, and it works great. It worked so well, I had taken it out of the phone line, but put it back in a few months back when "Credit Services" began calling my house daily. I no longer get those calls and I'm leaving it inline now. BTW, TeleZapper is now sold on Amazon.Com
Got one of these years ago. Full-proof. I have no connection with the company, other than I am the owner,and user of their product.
http://www.person-to-person.net/
“Verizon said they can’t do that, actually, they said can’t block numbers (against the law, she said)”.
Verizon told me the same thing. If it’s not illegal, I’d like to know so then I would switch to a phone company that allows it.
In the mean time, I simply do not answer callers that I don’t recognize.
We have DSL, thus have to have a land line.
Our landline phones have a silent button, which is always set to silent, and we have voicemail.
I clear the voicemail calls once a day or so, 1 out of about 50 is a legit call, and I make the call back at my convience.
As have I. And text message spam is also on the rise.
The Do Not Call list is a joke. Evidently, the gubmint is not yet big enough to enforce it. Just a few more trillion in stimulus ...
When I get a junk call, I google the number, and I usually find that lots of other people got called by the same number with the same or similar scam pitch. There are web sites devoted to tracking these numbers. You can add the call you received to the list for a given number. One would think the feds would go after the ones with the longest trails of complaints. But no ... You can file a formal complaint with the government, but it's a waste of time — I tried it once and got back an automated response and no action.
“The frequency picked up after I renewed our Do Not Call”
Ya’think the fed government might be selling the list of confirmed active phone numbers to telemarketers. . .you know. . .to help finance The Messiah’s re-election campaign?
Nah. . . .they wouldn’t. . .would they?
Rachel from cardholder services has been very busy. I also would give serious consideration to any politician who’d remove this nuisance from my life. Telemarketers, politicians, and charities (in that order) just have no business disturbing me in my home. We have taken to reporting every single telemarketer caller on the PA Do Not Call website. It’s very easy and I would recommend everyone doing it.
Same here. About twenty years ago I had a device on my office phone that flashed a bright light every time my phone rang. I was often on the other side of a glass wall in a data processing facility that I managed. Think I'll dig it out of my stored gadgets box and put some of my phones on silent mode. Only problem is my phone verbally announces names found in my contact list, which I listen for in order to pick up before going to record mode. All other calls go to recording or get blocked.
“There is an easy way to deal with this: don’t answer your home phone. Anyone who knows us will know our cell number.”
Doesn’t work.
I got those “Rachel from card member services” calls several times a week on my company provided cell phone and my wife and daughter have gotten them on their personal cell phones too.
I use the You Mail app for my iPhone to rid myself of annoying telemarketers and any caller with caller ID blocked. Works like a charm.
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