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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?
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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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 don't know if these help yet, but apparently if you make your answering machine/voice mail message start with a "disconnected signal" (http://www.telephonetribute.com/signal_and_circuit_conditions.htm) you can discourage autodialers. Somebody even markets a little device (telezapper) to do this for you.
I have no love for the CRTC, but the pressure probably came from elected officials via heavy lobbying. Regardless, after years of "click here to be removed from the list", how anyone didn't see this coming is beyond me.
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.
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.
No.... What we need are callerID numbers that are always transmitted and accurate. We need carriers to be held liable for bogus caller ID info transmitted on their networks. No exceptions.
This makes it a little harder for voip termination providers, but it can and needs to be done. Make it a criminal penalty to knowingly use bogus or forged callerID (allowing the loophole to use a number that BELONGS to you.)
Currently, (and I've mentioned this several times in the past) I use Asterisk for my phone system. In fact, I've been using it for over 5 years now (It is ROCK SOLID)
I've also had a few simple rules setup. First, I have a white list of close family and friends (those calls always go through, with callerID name re-writing so I see it's Bill and not "Wireless Caller".) Second, local calls are allowed during waking hours to get right through. At night, they have to press 1 to leave a message or press 5 to ring through. Third, tollfree numbers and NO callerID ALWAYS have to press 5 to ring through. Finally, the blacklist which just gives a disconnect tone sequence and phone company like message that the number is disconnected :-)
What have these rules done for me?
First, telemarketing calls are all blocked - along with charity solicitations and political crap. The sole exception (due to my rule set) was a couple calls from LOCAL political volunteers (I actually don't mind those - at least they are HUMAN.)
Second, wrong numbers in the middle of the night totally stopped.
I have my phone back. I can have dinner in peace. I sleep at night!
Actually, setting it up wasn't that bad. I already use a debian box (been using debian since before Ubuntu existed) for my internet gateway that sits in the basement. I bought a Digium analog FXS/FXO card (old style) with 4 ports on it for my two phone lines, and two extensions. I also have some old Cisco ATA's I bought long ago to provide 4 additional extensions. I actually don't use all the old analog ports since I got a couple Polycom VoIP desk phones (which have AWESOME speaker phones.) Again, I initially installed Asterisk long ago before there were distro packages, so I compiled from source. To be honest, it wasn't trivial (especially getting the ata's working) but not hard either. Certainly no harder than installing apache from source and configuring it.
Today it's stupid simple as the documentation for Asterisk is WAY better, and the configuration tools are far easier. Distro packages make Asterisk an apt-get install away, and there are pre-setup CD installs of asterisk available.
Originally (years ago) I had some issues with echo but modern code has totally solved that problem.
Since my install is so old, I can't really give you the perspective of what it would be like for someone new to it, I just know it's soooo much easier now than it used to be.
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.