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Auto Warranty Robocall Scammers Busted
ectotherm writes "The nice people behind the recorded phone messages stating 'By now you should have received your written note regarding your vehicle warranty expiring...' — the ones who instantly hang up when you ask for the name of the company — have been busted. Fox News did a little background digging on the four people charged." Don't know about you, but I received three or four postcards in the mail from these scammers, as well as uncountable robocalls. The FTC says they cleared $10M since 2007.
They don't know. My warranty expired 2 years ago and I get the cards and calls too. They seem to be mailing/calling people based on year model of the car and normal manufacturer's warranty, then continuing the mailings for several more years in case you got an extended warranty. People figure, "wow, they know when my warranty is up, so they must have gotten some "inside" info from the manufacturer, so they must be legit." It's just a variant of the perfect prediction scam.
When phones were newer it was just a matter of looking at the first 3 digits in some places. Back in my hometown in the mid 90s almost all of the local land line numbers were sure to be a certain couple prefixes, whereas the numbers you got from Verizon were different
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I worked for Verizon 10 and a half years fielding all kinds of calls about stuff like this, general repair problems, service order issues and etc. I can tell you first hand that there is absolutely nothing the representative you get on the phone can do about any of this. I even put in a few repair tickets to try to get help from the Central Office tech or a field tech, but there isn't much they can do, either. Congress is finally considering making caller ID spoofing illegal. However, the way the phone system is designed means that robocalls are one of the things that scammers can do to game the system - even if caller ID spoofing were not possible. The system is set up to allow anyone to call anyone else for any purpose - thus the "common carrier" statutes that everyone on /. likes to talk about and accuse the ISP's of breaking.
There is simply no way of communicating the fact that the rep is receiving lots of complaints about scammers to anyone that can do anything (the FCC and FTC). The reps are not allowed the time to lodge complaints with those two organizations on your behalf - even when the rep has Internet access to those organizations' web sites. So, if you want to lodge complaints about a scammer, you need to do it with the FCC and FTC, because the phone companies and their reps cannot stop the calls themselves or they break the common carrier statutes.
Generally, the reps have 4 minutes (as a monthly average) to interact with you over the phone. If they exceed this monthly average, then they are disciplined. At Verizon, they generally have only 30 seconds of "work time" (as a monthly average), which is the time they spend doing something after hanging up with you and before becoming available for their next call. It is very easy to exceed these averages and the reps have to work very hard to stay under those averages on every call. If the rep gets too interested in providing actual customer service, they will exceed those averages very quickly and be terminated if they continue to provide actual customer service. So, perhaps you can now understand why they try to get you off the phone so quickly. They are trying to do the best job they can according to the parameters that those who sign their paychecks have defined.