Talk about timing! I just posted last night that I had not heard from any telemarketers for the last three weeks ago and guess what. Yes, this time it was from 800-553-1077.
This one was a little different. When I picked it up, a recorded voice told me it was a call for “telemarketing purposes” and was for some kind of “special offer” from National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh, PA. The voice also informed me that I could call 800-553-1077 if I wanted more information about the call or something like that.
After the recording the line was just silent. I hung on for a while to see if someone was coming on the line that I could complain to but it just hung up on me after 30 seconds or so and a few clicks on the line.
See my previous post about how these telemarketers use automation to make telephone calls to their victims. This one took the extra step of having a recorded message to at least let people know where the call was coming from and what it was for. I’ll give them a little credit for not subjecting me to the “hang up” calls that most of the other telemarketers seem to be using.
I did call the number right back and an automated system allowed me to add my number to their “Do Not Call” list, which I did. Of course, it takes 5 days to process and 30 days for my number to be completely removed from their telemarketing system. More on that later.
As I’ve been saying lately, all this telemarketing started due to our “relationship” with CitiMortgage. We refinanced our mortgage back in January and the mortgage was then sold to CitiMortgage.
CitiBank/CitiMortgage has been on my list of lousy companies that should be avoided for many years, so it was just a stroke of bad luck that our mortgage was sold to those idiots. It appears my reasoning for adding them to my “crappy company list” was quite justified and I see they have not changed in the intervening 25 years or so!
OK, so maybe I am a little slow, but the more I thought about this situation, the more it started to make sense to me. Let me explain.
The “Do Not Call” laws that were enacted a number of years ago must have really put the damper on the telemarketing business. There must be millions of people on the “National Do Not Call” list and I know from my days in real estate that companies are serious about abiding by the law and not calling people who are on the list unless you had permission. It was drilled into our heads that we were not to violate the “Do Not Call” rules. Ever.
Making money certainly gives birth to creative ideas and sure enough, it appears that some companies have discovered the loopholes that allow them to call consumers even if they are on the national “Do Not Call” list.
As you may know, the “Do Not Call” rules do not apply if you have a “relationship” with a company. And since CitiMortgage is the company holding our mortgage, we have a “relationship” with them. This means that they can call us for telemarketing purposes despite the fact that our number is on the national “Do Not Call” list. If we tell them to add us to their “Do Not Call” list, then they can no longer call us for telemarketing purposes.
But the sneaky tactic that is being adopted these days is that the companies themselves are forming “relationships” with other companies like this fire insurance company that called today. Therefore, by extension, these other companies also have a “relationship” with you and can call you for telemarketing purposes. Pretty sneaky, eh?
Now this is speculation on my part concerning what kind of relationships these companies actually have. I don’t know of CitiMortgage owns these other companies that have been making telemarketing calls to our home or whether they are just forming “relationships” with each other to exchange lists of customer phone numbers.
Another thing is that I can’t imagine is where this “please allow 30 days to be removed from our telemarketing system” crap came from. That is the biggest bunch of B.S. I think I have ever heard and the telemarketing lobbyists must have paid off enough CongressCritters to get that written into the law.
Think about it. We live in the age of the Internet. Instant e-mail. Instant shopping online. Instant downloads. Everything happens so fast these days and since I worked in the computer industry for about 25 years, I know how long it takes to update a database.
These automated systems that are making the phone calls are no doubt working off of these phone number databases when they make calls, so flipping a bit or two in the database to change a “Do Call” number to a “Do Not Call” number is a very trivial matter and it should happen the second (actually less than that!) I pressed “1” to confirm that I wanted my number added to their “Do Not Call” list. This “30 days” crap is just to cover their asses in case they don’t get around to doing it right away. Or perhaps it is just to give them another opportunity to call up and annoy people a little more.
What this means for me is that I am going to have to go back to giving out phony phone numbers when dealing with many companies. I used to do that all the time because I did not want the telemarketing calls and these sneaky tactics of forming “relationships” with other companies to skirt the “Do Not Call” laws is starting to become quite annoying.
I never used a phony phone number that actually belonged to anyone else. I certainly did not want to be subjecting some other poor soul to these annoying phone calls, so what I did was look up a ISP (Internet Service Provider) that provides dial-up Internet access in my area. I would then locate their dial-up access phone numbers and adopt one of those as my phony phone number. When some company called to annoy me with telemarketing, instead they (or their machines) would just get that annoying dial-up modem squeal and never manage to reach me.
Thanks to sleazy stunts by sleazy companies like CitiBank/CitiMortgage, it appears I may have to go back to my old ways. If that is what it takes to stop the calls, that is what I will be doing.
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