The FTC has halted the operations of a business that was spamming basically every phone number in the United States, including Secret Service lines and 911 operators, offering “extended car warranties.”
I had personally gotten as many as three of these a day. Sometimes the calling number would be blocked, other times it would be a different number each time.
The FTC has received over 30,000 complaints.
The phone operators were instructed to never give the actual name of the company to anyone on the phone, at the risk of being fired. Also, they were to give customers fake telephone numbers so that they could not call back.
I just heard about this scam on the TWiT podcast,
because I’ve never received a single one of those
calls. I wonder why? I feel so unloved. I did get
several extended warranty mailings, though.
Surely they weren’t respecting the Do Not Call List?
Maybe next they can stop all those postcards from
“lawyers” offering me settlements for the Masonite
siding that is not even on my house.
YAAAAAAAAY! The slime weasels are out of business. Nothing controversial about this, Jim–do you know anybody who LIKES these guys?
I am proud to say that I was two of those 30,000 complaints. I have never filed a complaint before–about anything–but these calls were so annoying, so constant, and so blatantly untruthful that they got me irritated.
We’ll have to start a support group or something, because I never got one of these calls either. Though I rarely, if ever, answer my landline if I don’t know the person calling (thank God for caller ID), so I may have had them calling and not know it. I do answer my cell phone, usually, because it may be a work related call. I definitely never got a call on my cell.
