They called my very private cell phone number at 8:59 AM PDT on 29 March 2015. Caller ID said Hackensack, NJ. I did not answer. They did not leave a message. My phone numbers are on the Do Not Call list. I will report them to DoNotCall.gov.
These people made our life a living hell! It started when they called my husband's work place. He is in parts management at an ag equipment business and there are constant phone calls from his customers calling to talk to him about getting parts for repair of their machinery. These scammers kept calling, non-stop, tying up business phone lines. They told my husband that he needed to pay off a debt immediately to avoid "jail time" & my husband asked what the debt was for. They said they couldn't "divulge that info over the phone", so my husband said "Send me the bill and if it's a legitimate debt & I owe it, I'll pay it!" They (and these scammers have a very heavy Indian accent) told him no - he needed to "pay it w/ his credit card or debit card or even check-by-phone" & my husband lied & said "I don't have any of those things" to which they replied "yes you do, you have..." and proceeded to name which credit cards he has, and our bank name!! My husband kept telling him to send the bill which irritated them so badly, that when my husband hung up on them, they would call right back in a matter of seconds!! They started to threaten him & told him they know where his wife works - named my work place- and have people watching for when I come out of work, and they're going to break my legs if he doesn't give them his credit card info. My husband's job at that time was 40 miles away from home. He almost lost his job over their constant non-stop calls - tying up their work lines. So he called the local police where he worked at and an officer came and intercepted the call & informed him they placed a tracer on the line and they were going to charge him w/ a number of felonies and misdemeanors if he didn't stop. The calls stopped at his work for the rest of the day. They alerted police in our home town, & they had to come & watch over me when i left work, and followed me home and made sure i was safe and checked out our home b4 i entered, as they took the scammers threat seriously. But as soon as officers left, the calls started coming in at our home number, it was a completely different phone number. It got so bad, local police finally told us to call the FBI. I spoke to a very nice agent who said this goes on all the time. They are most usually from east India and surrounding areas and they purchase phones that cannot be traced because they purchase minutes then usually they pitch the phones shortly after they buy them and get new ones, and start over terrorizing people. They buy your information from many different places for a very small fee and they know EVERY THING about you going back years!! They are extremely hard to catch, especially because they are in foreign countries and they can't track their phones due to throw-away phones. He told me the next time they call, to tell them I'd been in contact w/ an FBI agent, and give them the agent's name and his identification/badge number and to tell scammers the FBI agent is tracing this call wants to speak w/ them. He hung up before I even got to the agent's ID/badge number & they never called again. That's the extreme you'll have to go to in order to make it stop if it becomes as scary as our ordeal became!
Call blocker installed by the employer might be of some assistance. Also, do not engage these people in conversation. They are looking for vulnerable people. If they sense in some way or another your're vulnerable, they will hammer you with even more calls. Simply hangup and block. Eventually the calls will stop.