I've been reading the follow up comments. I'm breaking my vow of silence to write this, but it was my own vow. It's not like one of the moderators asked me to leave.
I don't know who Jenn is. I also don't know who Steamboat Bill is. I know who Ride is only because that's who people were originally accusing me of being. I saw him respond on another recent thread.
I'm going to respond to a few posts and then explain why some of you continue to receive calls despite being registered with the national do not call list.
Have you ever been to a psychiatrist - and told the truth? If so, what was the diagnosis?
Did you have a happy childhood and a good relationship with your parents?
Were you abused as a child?
Did you/do you abuse drugs or alcohol? - Did either of your parents?
I actually responded to this in a PM to her already. Here's a recap for the rest of you.
I've never been to a psychiatrist, but I do regularly see a licensed mental health counselor. I have not been diagnosed with anything in particular. However, he has explained to me that people who steal are, at least on some level, trying to get revenge in one form or another. It's not something that I'm consciously aware of, apparently. His leading theory is that I'm upset with my father for being an alcoholic and lying to my mother about whether or not he's been drinking when she's out of town.
My childhood was happy. I was never abused. I do a lot of drugs. I'm not addicted to any of them. I deliberately switch from one drug to another after about a week as to not develop a chemical dependance on any particular drug.
Something is clearly wrong with me. I just don't know what it is.
LOL - you wish TUGBrian would've weighed in? It bothers you that he didn't?
Shux, that quote may reveal the real motive behind this whole exercise -- just to get a rise out of the Grand Pro.
It doesn't bother me. It just would have been interesting to get his take. Hearing what he had to say wasn't my motivation for writing. I just noticed that he was the main person posting links to scamming stories. The other guy online that posts these stories with Captain Ahab-like regularity is JayJay on redweek.com.
I for one would love to have seen our "here today / gone tomorrow" alleged "scammer" offer some concrete and specific assertions regarding the actual source(s) of the sucker lists contact info acquired and utilized by such scammers --- whether real or "just pretending".
I went into far more detail about this than anything else I talked about.
I can smell a scam from a mile away so be careful.
Yet you own a timeshare.
It's the time of the year, the season of trollers
You would make more money than I do if you got paid to repeatedly say the same thing with the highest possible word count. It's always funny when the know-it-all doesn't know what they're talking about.
The internet is a big place. I'm sure you can find a forum somewhere that is receptive to your Chicken Little-like false proclamations.
Does this sound like a good plan?
It sounds ideal from a scammer's perspective.
the article claims most of the scammers are in Canada.
Anything's possible, I suppose. It seems to me that most of the scam rings are in central and southern Florida. You never hear about a scam operation from, say, Ames, Iowa, or Indianapolis getting raided. They're always somewhere in Florida.
There are exceptions, just not many. The 30-year-old woman who got arrested for scamming $30m was somewhere in New Jersey. I would be willing to bet that she had strong connections to Florida, but I could be wrong.
Y'all have been played by the troll. The troll is in some private forum somewhere with some of his buddies, and they're all smirking and laughing together at how easily it was to play you, merely for their amusement.
Have you ever encountered trolls? I have. Lots of them. They don't behave the way that I do. Sure, I've written a few snarky replies, but they were responses to unjustified hostility. I'm not picking fights or arbitrarily insulting people. I'm honestly responding to questions and truthfully giving accounts of how scamming operations work.
The Do Not Call List Issue
I've seen quite a few of you complain about receiving these calls even though you're on the Do Not Call List. You should know that the Do Not Call List isn't even a distant consideration to people who are running telemarketing rooms.
These call centers are set up in such a way that they only have very broad control over who they're calling. The autodialer is set up by a third party that charges the rooms to use their services. The typical dialer costs $100 per rep per day. A day is usually calculated as a six hour shift.
When I say that the people managing the dialer remotely (that is, from their own sales floor) have broad control over who they're calling, what I mean by that is they can designate which area codes their room will target. For instance, 313 is usually a popular one. That's Detroit.
The leads that get loaded into the dialer have varying amounts of information. The most typical set up has no information whatsoever attached to the phone number. What that means is when a fronter (the term for the first person that talks to somebody who responds to a dialer) answers a call, they cannot see any identifying information about who they're speaking to aside from their phone number. In the rooms that have computers (about half), fronters will have 411.com pulled up on their computers so they can quickly try to find out who they're talking to.
Some rooms actually have relatively sophisticated VOIP systems that will show them the name and address of who they're speaking to when the call comes through. Not many though.
The leads that telemarketing rooms receive are by no means exclusive to them. In fact, when the people who run the dialers (I would say there are 10 or less in total in Florida) take on services for any given room, they simply load in the same numbers that they've already sold to all the other telemarketing rooms that they're already servicing. This can be particularly aggravating for people on the receiving end of the calls.
A person can truthfully tell a fronter that they've received this particular call six times already that day, but it's likely that the first five came from other rooms using the same calling list.
It would be to the telemarketing room's advantage to scrub the phone numbers of people who are very obviously uninterested in whatever they're pitching from the calling lists. However, they don't have any way to stop calling that phone number even if they wanted to. Some of them pay lip service to the Do Not Call List by telling their reps (the words "rep" and "fronter" can be and are used interchangeably) to write down the phone numbers of people who asked to be placed on the DNCL. However, even if they hand the numbers over to the people who run the dialers, nothing is ultimately done to get those people off of the calling lists.
Operating an autodialer isn't a hard thing to do. The reason that all the telemarketing rooms use third party dialers is because they have sophisticated safeguards that are very difficult to implement without substantial Asterisk (the PBX programming language) experience.
For instance, most of you have noticed that you are unable to return calls to the numbers that show up on your caller IDs when you receive telemarketing calls. The outgoing calls are spoofed.
The spoofs take on different characteristics depending on how the dialer is set up. Sometimes the return number will have nonexistent exchanges like 000 (as in 1-800-000-5534 or 813-000-9221 or 305-000-6134 etc). Other times, the spoof will make the number appear as if it's somebody local to you. Let's say your phone number is 202-555-1114. The spoof in that case will make the phone number appear as if it's 202-555-1115. It will similarly emulate whatever number is being called.
It's borderline impossible for a regular person to track down where the call is coming from. Maybe one or two of the self-proclaimed computer geniuses on this board will tell me how easy it is to find out where the calls are coming from, but I've never heard of one being traced. A lot of the spoofed numbers get reported to the FTC and the FCC. As far as I can tell, they make no effort to find out where the calls originate from.
The spoof is a difficult feat to accomplish. It's far from impossible though. The reason why most of these telemarketing rooms use the third party dialers is because they route the calls through foreign countries. The most common country is The Bahamas. There's no reason why it would need to be The Bahamas that I know of. That just seems to be the place they all choose to do it.
People running telemarketing rooms are very aware of the penalties associated with violating the DNCL. By using a third party dialer, they essentially sidestep any liability associated with violating it.
I guess that's it for now.
