Here is the thing…while some of those marketing calls (perhaps even most) are selling something “new”; some are selling something “new” based on your existing service choices.
If my insurance company or mortgage lender has a new program that could save me money or the dealership I bought my last car at wants to offer me a great trade in deal on my 4 yr old Outback…I want to get that call and make that choice.
You can’t just lump all of them into one tidy bucket, which was the point Oliver made in his piece.
Sometimes if I have time to waste, I follow the prompts to connect to a human and a simple “To whom are you trying to reach?” usually kills their script.
If I am feeling malicious, I tell them that my address is at 840 Bryant St in San Francisco (the county courthouse/jail), and to use the South Entrance (the visitor intake area.)
At least 90% of my calls are robocalls. I seem to get a few types of calls for a while, then they move on to some other scams.
Ugh, yeah. Lately I’ve been getting some text spam which then gets followed up by robocalls. It’s simultaneously maddening, baffling and amusing. They’re all from two Texas area codes from the same area (I’m in California), they all use the exact same spiel for the texts and the phone calls (though it’s various voices reading the same script), saying something about how this is “random,” but would I be interested in selling my property for cash? At first I thought it was an individual or couple people responsible (I also get similar letters from some local guy/small group), until the messages started piling up, despite immediately blocking each number they sent them from. The messages all present themselves as one-offs that I should just ignore if I’m not interested (so they don’t even pretend there’s a way to make them stop), but it’s hard to ignore them when they send me dozens of messages.
What’s extra weird is that the texts sometimes specify “my” name and property address - but it’s not my name, and the property is in another part of California entirely (not that I own any land). But it’s always the same name and address. I don’t even understand how such an obviously crap automated system makes sense for them. (Or if it’s deliberately crap - like they’re deliberately using a random name and address for all these come-ons, hoping someone will hear/read the message and think, “Well, it’s a wrong number, but I’m looking to sell my property for cash!”)
They can mail me a letter. They already know the address. It’ll be much easier to absorb the details about what they are offering as a letter than on a blind phone call at a random time. Plus, I can cross reference the call back number with the official contact numbers.
The difference between my insurance company or lender calling to offer me more coverage as a blind call and a scammer/shady third party insurer calling to offer me some additional coverage on a blind call are impossible to determine.
A call saying “Hi we noticed you don’t have coverage XYZ” or “you’re under insured”, using land ownership, deeds, leans, and other public information or worse yet, leaked information from any of the many data leaks. It’s super easy to spoof the entire call and pretend it’s someone you’ve had a relationship with instead of someone totally new.
A piece of real old fashion mail, with the ability to cross reference it with the companies web site. If I want to talk to someone, I’ll call them, or set up an appointment time.
Having purchased a house recently, even the mail shows up trying to mislead. Cross checking it is definitely required. An option that’s not available on the phone at all.
Yeah, I was getting those about 6 weeks ago. “My wife and I are new to the area” etc. In one instance they knew my name and address (and, obviously, my phone number). One of them called my house, cell, and work number (the last is at a federal facility, which I might’ve thought was a big no-no). Something fouled up where it came up “Unknown caller” on the caller ID, but the voice mail actually showed the number.
I reported it to FCC & FTC, and then it stopped, but I seriously doubt one had to do with the other. The POTUS seems like someone who would gleefully generate and/or lend his voice to robocalls in which case I imagine he’s disinclined to stop them.
I got one of those fake “IRS is threatening to arrest you” calls once. The guy talking had such a thick Pakistani accent I could just barely understand him. I demanded to talk to his supervisor and got a different guy with an accent only slightly better. When I asked his name he told me “Johnny Christian.” They finally hung up on me because I was laughing so hard.
The problem is that no one can reasonably trust calls like an incoming insurance product from their company because scammers would be offering the same product, but not cracking down on unsolicited phone sales means everyone else loses a lot of the utility of their phone.
Tom Wheeler said it perfectly…the choice should be in the consumer’s hands. And he is 100% right!
Your mortgage lender or a any company should allow us to make that choice. You don’t want calls…you turn them off or say “add me to the do not call list”. I want them so I turn it on.
THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT.
Edit: @moortaktheundea Really…nice absolute you threw in there. NO ONE? You sure no one can ever possibly figure out what is or isn’t a legit call?
again…Oliver’s entire piece is NOT about saying “Shut it all down…make it so no one gets a call from anyone but those they know in their contact list”. The point is to allow consumer choice!!! You don;t get to decide for me that I can’t determine what is or isn’t legit, nor does someone else get to decide that my communication preference is mail vs phone. I GET TO DECIDE THAT FOR MY SELF…and so do you. The old rules allowed that very thing.
Fair enough.
I watched it on youtube, we’re probably a season behind on the actual show.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail after all.
Not allowing any calls is clearly the hammer solution, with no nuance or choice. (all those pitfalls)
Enforcing caller id, and having caller id security would go a long way to adding the nuance and choice back in. Maybe then you could tell apart a real call from a company you do business with and a cold call or total scam.
I welcome the day when the caller ID will be “AT%T” or “AT#T” trying to pretend to be “AT&T”, instead of both of them being “Unknown Caller” or some random string of digits with no way to tell them apart. Or when it’s knowing that “Society for X” isn’t really raising money for X but just a scamy name.
Sure some people might figure it out, but in the meantime a lot more have been scammed. My solution is little less absolute than @mmascari’s . Ban number spoofing, make the do not call list absolute and require explicit opt in as a stand alone agreement to any such solicitation. If you want ads from your insurance company you can tell them, but I don’t have to answer 30 scam calls a day to engage in a job search.
Which too that exact point…I have AT&T and set my preferences with them to SMS. So I always know which short code it is and know when they want to talk to me
That’s probably enough. But, it’s not just “ban doing it”. It should be required at the network level. When the caller ID comes up on a phone, it should either not be possible to spoof. Or if required for compatibility, verified values should indicate that vs unverified values. I already see values come up with “SPAM? XXX” in them. If every value came up with “VER: XXX” for verified, or just plain for verified and and “? XXX” for ones that are not verified. That would solve almost all issues.
It would still ring to often. But, at least you would know with some confidence who it was and that a verified id value when cross referenced was that actual party.
That would be a bonus. I would settle for just the verified caller id.
Can the short code be spoofed the same way as caller id can?
I’ve taken to saving a contact for every short code when I interact with a company, just to make it easier. It always bugs me when the same company uses a bunch of different short codes for seemingly the same purpose.
I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me to check if they can be spoofed.
It cannot because of the method in which the API calls are made between the carrier and the originator of the message. It’s similar to when using a 1-800 #. Which is why these robocalls are now using standard land line numbers…which are easy to spoof and to get new ones.
