Called and left no message. My telephone number is new and is also unpublished and unlisted along with being on the Do Not Call List registry! How did they get this number?
When I answered, a recorded message stating that the call was from "card member services international regarding my account" played. It offered the option of talking to a representative or being removed from their list.
The recording referenced assistance with reducing debt. It sounds like they are preying on the financially stressed.
Called and left no message. My telephone number is new and is also unpublished and unlisted along with being on the Do Not Call List registry! How did they get this number?
Reno -- you need to join the real world. There are a lot of calls from legitimate companies which violate the TSR and the TCPA. Violating our privacy, acting like jerks, ignoring laws, and generally irritating people are not marks of a scam.
You cite no evidence -- no basis whatsoever -- for your scurrilous allegation. 800Notes would be a very useful tool if people would refrain from bizarre comments like yours, and take a few moments when calls like these come in, to try and find out the source.
Of course, they go out of their way to avoid that. I answered the call I got from 323-301-0437 on the second ring. Silence. They hung up.
This isn't a scam. It's something called a predictive dialer. It calls a bunch of people at once. As soon as all of their lines have suckers on the other end, they hang up the rest of the lines. Then, when a line becomes free, they dial a bunch more numbers -- and hang up on all but the first one to answer.
If we would all work to develop real and useful and provable information about the sources of these calls, AND THEN FILE LAWSUITS, calls like these would vanish almost overnight. As long as we leap to baseless conclusions and post (here) things like "Quit calling me." (Which the jerks never read.) and merely mention that we've been bothered, etc. they will keep bothering us.
Some people post here, saying we should start calling the telemarketers and harassing them. That won't work.
Filing with the FCC, FTC, and your state's Attorney General may take time and it may not appear to work, but look over at the right, under "Latest News," and read the link "Calling Do-not-call Numbers Costs 3 U.S. Firms $1.2M." If enough people complain -- and give solid, usable information -- it will be easier for more of those kinds of companies to be forced to pay that kind of money.
More importantly, if you and I file lawsuits, we can (together) collect millions of dollars. I know this, based on experience. One guy I know has collected more than $100,000. I have barely started, but collected quite a few checks -- including $10,000 for a single call. You need to have your act together, but you can do it too.
I have filed suit against one of the companies mentioned in the article, and I will use that article next week, at a pretrial hearing. If a lot of people had filed suits, that article probably wouldn't have been written because the companies would have gone broke, or they would have stopped their illegal calling.
Think about this: if each of the people who have posted about this number files a lawsuit, and if each of them only collects $500 -- the company will still have to pay lawyers between $1,000 and $10,000 to fight each of our lawsuits. WE, the people, could eventually force this company to spent $1.2 million dollars if we will use 800Notes as a valuable tool, and seriously pursue that which the law says we're entitled to have.
Mike, many of these outfits simply call every number which exists. They don't know or care who you are. They don't know or care if you're on the Do Not Call list, either. They don't care if a number is published or not. They just call 123-456-7890 then 123-456-7891 and 7892 and 7893 and so forth . . . right through the list of numbers. There's no way they'll know if a number in the sequence is published or not.
THEY SHOULD know about the state or federal Do Not Call list, if you're on it. But, they may not need to.
Some companies, depending on who they are, have exemptions, and can call people on the Do Not Call list. Legally. Until you tell them "Put us on all do not call lists." That means the organization-specific list AND the telemarketing company-specific list.
If you buy something at Joe Blow's Hardware, you're a customer, and they can legally call you. If the organization is the "Orange Cross Non-Profit," they can legally call you. If either of them hires "Teledialers Forever" to make their phone calls for them, that company may have its own list. So, if you're not specific, they may put you on one Do Not Call list, but not the other . . . and you may still get calls from one or the other.
"Take us off of your list" is not what you want to tell them. "Put us ON your do-not-call list" is the magic phrase. All organizations, no matter the nature of them, must maintain do not call lists. If you ask to be on a telemarketing company's do not call list, then that company can never call you on behalf of any future clients. If you ask to be on the client organization's do-not-call list, then that organization's do-not-call list prevents a different telemarketing company from calling you on their behalf.