Autodialed and illegal charity call disrupted my midafternoon on 25 May. Generic CNAM was "Bristol RI". I made two verbal responses upon answering and heard nothing. It took their dialer fourteen long seconds to deliver a familiar two-tone transfer chime, and another two seconds to pass me to a rep, obviously operating a soundboard. The FCC wants this to happen within two seconds of my human response.
The soundboard featured male voice samples in a vowel-strained drawl not heard anywhere here in the Northeast. The audio level was very weak, as was the convoluted pitch for (I guess) "fallen" police. My hatred of commercial fundraising for soundalike "hero charities" is well documented on this site, so I won't massage the point here of how this call is end-to-end fraudulent.
This is what I got when the pitch finally began. Spelling is phonetic to emulate the accent. Parts I can't make out are parenthesized:
Soundboard: "Hah, good afternoon. This-siz (Kim Dallon) Ah'm cawllin fr'm th' national (sission forfun) Well, the cawl IS recorded fer quawl'ty assurance, okay? [bot voice continues without a natural pause, quickly and a near monotone] Sir, they jist lawst a maj'r campaign yew-nited grass roots movement of Ameri-cun citizens who will stand b'hind our police, an' help ruhstorr an' puhmote rih-spect an' safety of our Ameri-cun police awf'cers. Now sir, when yew receive yer pledge kit, c'n the National P'lice Support Fund count on yew fer yer sip-port?"
I asked immediately for a copy of their "Do Not Call" Policy. I knew this would choke the operator, who hit the "stall for time" command: "Now, ah'm sorry. Coo .. Could jew repeat thet ple ..."
I cut off the played sample and repeated myself loudly like the guy was deaf. The board op promptly hit whatever is marked "DNC": "Not a problem, an' ah 'pologize, we'll go raht ahead an' add'ja to owr Do Not Cawl list, okay? Thanks." The caller disconnected within seconds.
Notice that I did not request DNC placement, I asked for a policy, which the call center should have printed and ready to mail. I don't have the name of the commercial fundraiser, so I have no way to verify if the same caller tries again in a month. I usually drill for that sort of detail, but my patience and time were cut short. I speculate that the "quality assurance" disclaimer is a tacit way to cover the fact that I'm hearing nothing but canned audio, this being the common industry excuse for (ab)using soundboards.
I was unable to match anything on this site for the phrase "National Police Support Fund", but then again these predators use so many variants of similar names that I doubt I'm the first to report this fraud-raiser's activity.
This comes a week after all the National Police Week chatter in Congress from a certain majority party, playing for cheap applause from state constituents and floating a somewhat duplicative bill to add the death penalty to the available remedies for people who shoot down cops. No discussion, I notice, of how to discipline police who use their own guns to clear our streets of unwanted poor people.