I’m in my recliner and watching some TV in my living room when the phone rings. I am watching the local news station that I get directly off the roof-top antenna so I don’t get the Caller ID display that my Dish Network DVR serves up when we get a call. Figures.
Since my wife is sitting in the kitchen near the phone, I ask her to check the display and see who it is. By this time the phone has rung 3 times and one more remains until the answering machine picks up.
“Upgrade Now” she says to me. I don’t know what the heck she is talking about, so I probably said something intelligent like, “Huh?”
“Upgrade Now, that’s what it says,” she tells me.
Sounds like it could be a telemarketer so I decide to just let the machine get it. I know my wife, and I know she is not going to pick it up either. If it is important, I figure whoever it is will leave a message.
No message was left on our machine. Another sign of a telemarketer!
Naturally, I decide to research 702-520-1214 a bit on the net, and sure enough, this looks like another number I’d rather not see on my Caller ID.
Curiously, there are reports of two types of telemarketing calls that unfortunate recipients have reported coming from this number.
The first type of call does not seem to have attracted the same level of attention as the second type of call. The first was reported by a few folks to be some kind of sales pitch for satellite TV or something.
That kind of make sense to me since I did receive a telemarketing call a couple of years ago claiming to be from Dish Network and trying to sell me more programming.
As a Dish Network customer has been very happy with the service for the 8 years or so I have had it, I knew Dish Network had been told to add me to their “Do Not Call” list and I was more than a little ticked off when they called.
Although I was never able to get a definitive answer about who actually called me, Dish Network claimed they did not make the call and that there were some ‘unscrupulous’ independent dealers out there who did not follow the rules and were calling people that were on the “Do Not Call” list and violating the rules.
The whole thing just seemed fishy to me and I was never sure if it was indeed Dish Network that had called or not. Being happy with their service for so long, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
In that sense, a call from “Upgrade Now” that some have reported has to do with satellite TV, sounds like it might make sense.
The trouble is that the second scenario also makes a lot of sense to me.
There were more reports about the calls coming from 702-520-1214 being about some kind of extended warranty plan for automobiles.
If you’ve read my recent entries here about telemarketing, you will know what I am talking about.
And, if this is indeed about extended warranty plans, I have a good idea whose to blame for the call. My dear friends at CitiMortgage!
I am not going to go as far as accusing them just yet, but it sure is suspicious since I have received telemarketing calls in the last few days that were orchestrated by CitiMortgage and were about extended warranty plans.
These weasels from 702-520-1214 will surely call again, just like the last bunch of morons who called, and when they do, I will attempt to extract as much information from them as I possibly can.
I will be surprised if the mark of CitiMortgage is not on this latest call, but if it isn’t and this is just some random telemarketing call, I will likely be filing a complaint against them since I am on the national “Do Not Call” list.
After getting virtually no telemarketing calls for the last few years, it is hard for me to imagine that CitiMortgage is not the dark force behind this one as well. If so, I will surely have some more thoughts to share about that outfit!
You might want to take a gander at this article that I discovered when I was researching this latest call. It’s only a few days old and reports on the extended warranty telemarketing calls that are coming from this number.
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