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Fraudsters Abusing Canada's Do-Not-Call List
J ROC writes "Phone numbers on Canada's Do-Not-Call registry have apparently been sold to off-shore telemarketers, scam artists, and other ne'er-do-wells, according to reports in the Globe & Mail and CBC News. The CRTC, which runs the registry, sells lists of phone numbers online for a small fee; making it available to anybody who might be interested in buying it, including con artists. I guess this explains why, ever since I added my number to the registry, I've been getting phone calls from 000-000-0000 trying to interest me in some free vacation scam. Canada's Privacy Commissioner is currently investigating."
What idiots -- Illegally contact people that you already know are especially hostile toward dealing with you. How many sales do they actually expect to make?
It looks like we now need a do-not-call, do-not-call list!!
That's it! I'm moving to... oh, wait. Nevermind.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I added my cell, the wife's cell and our home phone number to the list. A month or so later, I got my first telemarketer call.
I called up the government's do not call list registry to complain, but they hung up on me and told me that they weren't interested in what I was selling. They asked "how would I like it if they called me at home during dinner", and asked to be taken off of my call list
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Wow, good job CRTC.
My telemarketing calls went from about 2 a week to 6+. Good thing I'm rarely home and they get the answering machine instead.
That is the most annoying call ever. I blame bell for all this. THey're making money of each scam call in network fees.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
If you no longer wish to receive our emails for the crap we sell, just reply by email with the following:
Sunject:I am a real, valid email address
Body:
Your age
Number of children
Do you own a home?
Take prescription meds?
And we promise to remove you forever!
I'm in Canada and find, via *69, that these calls are coming from telemarketers with phone numbers in the United States. So, the list is working. We're not getting calls from Canada we're getting them from the States and, likely, there are equivalent scenarios being used to get around do-not-call lists for the States. Since the calls are coming from the States you can try to put your number on their list but they won't accept an area code outside of the U.S. So, that's how you get around the list. Originate your calls for one country from another country that doesn't abide by the do-not-call list. What's going to be needed now are cross border agreements that each country will help enforce the other's do-not-call lists.
*Sound of fog horn*
I agree, that's the most irritating call I've ever gotten. I normally hang up on telemarketers, but now I make a point of trying to keep that one on the line as long as possible.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I think that is the first time I have heard of international telemarketing. I have heard the exact same recorded message here in the UK.
To DNC registry worked well for a while. But then unscrupulous telemarketers started figuring out how to issue bogus number identifications so you can't issue complaints against them, and using an automated system, claiming to be about your auto warranty, or your "credit card company" (not by name), and try to get you to press 1 - at which point you then establish a business relationship with the telemarketer/vendor and they are then exempt from harassing you forever more.
Lately, we have been getting numerous phone calls from "Texas Guaranteed". And now, I'm getting phone calls from a "white pages/yellow pages" company to continue a listing for my fictional company which has never had a listing in any pages since it isn't really real. The funny part is these are from a real person, who gets rude when my wife says that she won't talk to them.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
The CRTC should create a series honey-pot numbers, and give different combinations to those who purchase the lists. Scammers and those-who-sell-to-scammers would not be aware of which numbers are honey-pot numbers, and would call them anyways.
The CRTC could use this to easily weed out the bad from the good.
I think that will not help much if you are already getting telemarketer calls. If your phone number has already been sold by the CRTC then it's out there. It can be sold by the telemarketer and resold much like email addresses and SPAM.
Caller ID?
Oh, right. That feature that my telephone company wants me to pay extra for...
How about the telco refuses to pass calls with invalid caller ID numbers?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Two calls from an unsolicited number is all I ever get. After the second call the number simply gets screened and the incoming call gets forwarde--guess where--back to itself. Sometimes I get giddy imagining the telemarketer reciting her pitch to the person in the next cubicle.
Of course, callers with the caller ID of "000-000-0000" or "10" simply get forwarded to the Rejection Hotline.
I'm on primus, but I imagine other voip providers have similar functionality, as would asterisk and its ilk.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
When called, first talk really quietly so they turn their headset up, then use a very sharp whistle (or a foghorn, up to you and how sensitive your neighbors are). Repeat as needed until they hang up.
For some odd reason, I don't get any telemarketer calls anymore. Works better than any do-not-call list.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If there is a list, and it has value, it will eventually be sold. It is important to remember that the government consists of regular people, not angels, no different from people doing any other job. A certain percentage will be unscrupulous, as in any collection of people, and the unscrupulous will be attracted to positions of power, influence and money, just like in any other organization.
You might be able to vote out the person who wrote the bill, and the politicians that put it into law, but you can't vote out the bureaucrat that actually handles the goods -- that person is outside the influence of us regular citizens. Not because of any Star Room conspiracy, but simply because he's the person who has access, and the temptation is too great.
So for a given list, like a do-not-call list, or back-door passwords held in escrow, or a list of people in a certain position, if it has value, an unscrupulous person will find a way to cash in on it, or someone will be coerced into doing so by another unscrupulous person. The more valuable the list, the more likely that the attempt will be made.
This is vital to remember. When you hear "the government will take care of it" the first question you should ask is "why do you think so? What makes the people that make up the government any different from the people who make up, say, the phone company?"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'd go into your bank and ask if you can be taken off their marketing lists.
I had the same thing happen with CIBC and one day I got a pushy salesman that pissed me off. I marched into the local branch, told them my sad story, and then was somewhat surprised to see them clicking away at their computer and unchecking me from several lists.
The teller said it's quite rare that people ask to be taken off those lists. It must be because so few people know about it.
Maybe each list should be salted with a number which identifies the recipient of the list. When that number is called, sue the original recipient.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Where have you been? I won't argue about the email bit, and I realize it's nothing to be proud of, but Canada has the best, as well as the most successful/notorious fraudulent telemarketers on Earth.
Check news articles from end of the 1990s and a year or two after. Montréal has an international reputation for having the highest grossing ongoing, organized criminal telemarketers in the Entire World (Vancouver is doing okay along those lines, also).
Interpol, in Europe and the FBI, down here in the US, had to go up there and basically "shame" the RCMP into raiding and taking down the top of that food chain. Two chains, really, one, a non-denominational consortium of Irish, Jewish, Greek and Cosa Nostra guys, and the other being the financial "fund raising" arm of the Hell's Angels, headed by Denis Morin.
The "Phonebusters", up at Thunder Bay, were outgunned and subverted once cases hit the Court system. There were rumors, underground, that the first really huge case to hit the system in Ontario (which involved two Montréalers, one of whom was Les Pinsky) was a slam dunk, requiring a $250,000 payoff to someone in the Ministry of the Attorney General to get away scot free. The Ontario Provincial judge in the case was furious at having to throw out a case against a guy who had made $12 million in the previous year ("officially", the actual figure was way up there), because of "screw-ups" by Crown lawyers.
Meanwhile, in Montréal, the RCMP had one of their people visiting owners and part-owners of a dozen seemingly separate businesses, telling them what amounts of individual Bank Drafts, etc, were going to be "flagged" in the system, which ,mail drops had been added to surveillance, etc. "Guidance" in other words.
The biggest gang didn't go down until a lady in Ontario, who was addicted to sending cash to telephone fraudsters, and was embezzling huge cash from a firm she worked at, killed herself, and the FBI just blew a gasket. And Denis Morin, who was under observation for years, by Canadian legal people, wasn't busted until he was walking into Disney World, in Orlando, by FBI agents (with OPP and RCMP guys tagging along for the photo op.
Les Pinsky, one of the old-school telemarketing guys in Montréal, died recently, before his recent case could get to Court (natural causes). If you visit the Portage, a drug and alcohol treatment facility on St antoine Street in Montréal, chances are that Les' picture is still up on the wall of grads. Even some of his closest friends knew that what he was doing was not just illegal, but all the way wrong, yet still loved him, in some cases, for the beneficial work and volunteering he had done. But the notion that man can sin with one hand and do good works with the other, and that these things "balance out" somehow, morally, are delusional. Isaiah, in the Old Testament, was very persuasive about what those who thought that they could, God-like, make these assessments and draw conclusions about their "faith saving them in the end" were in store for.
A lot of folks will be glad Les is dead. That's easy to understand. People who knew him, who knew something about him besides "his job" can only wonder how things might have gone if he had used his skills and abilities for something that was "good." But he didn't, or, rather, he did, but those numerous acts were simply outweighed by his "real" work. A lot of people got hurt, and even his close friends know that that is totally unacceptable.
Don't think for a moment that Canada isn't more than adequately "represented" as far as fraud goes. There's a reason, or two, why the gargantuan heroin importing "company" that was known as "The French Connection" had Montréal and little ports up and down the Canadian east coast as its last stop on the way to New York, Chicago and Detroit. And it wasn't smoked meat sandwiches and Molsons.