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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.
Its funny, as soon as the car warranty scammers stopped calling last month, I now get robocalls for some cheapo health care ripoff. On my cell, on the do not call list. So it begins again.....
and there were no criminal charges filed against them.
What I found interesting were the priors for some of these people. You'd expect related charges, but they're totally off-base:
- indecent exposure
- obstruction
- trespassing
- battery
- filing a false report of a bomb
- firearm violations
That's quite an interesting assortment.
And although I got robocalled a lot, I never did get any of their postcards. I'm not on the DNC registry.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I actually led them on for quite a while by asking dumb naive questions. I was trying to go so far as to find out where to send the check. I think they wanted a credit card number. I did get a company name at one point, but it was something generic. It didn't come up when I later googled it. I write the name down but must have tossed the paper.
I wasted a little of their time, and had fun doing it. Does that count for anything?
They called my lab repeatedly while I was a grad student, after several calls I kept a log with time, date, and apparent Caller ID number (which was always bogus) and any info I could get out of the operators. But hey, I was a grad student, so I had time to kill, I just kept them on the phone for as long as possible.
scammer: Your car warranty is expired, would you like to renew your auto warranty?
....
me: expired?
scammer: yes, wou---
me: are you sure my warranty expired?
scammer: yes, would you like to renew your auto warranty?
me: well, which car are we talking about?
scammer: The newer one
me: the new one? i bought them at the same time.....
and when I got bored (rare) or sensed that they were about to hang up (usual)
me: I'd like you to know that I report every one of these calls to the FTC (and I really did: http://www.ftc.gov/phonefraud )
I think my number finally got blacklisted by their phone operators or something, after awhile they just hung up on me every time. Once the operator just tried to heckle my school's sports team. (its tough to rattle a geek by making fun of a football team) I *always* pressed '1' when I got those calls, must have logged at least 30 calls on the FTC website.
They didn't know a thing about your warranty. Or your car. The call folks all the time who either have no cars, or ancient cars that haven't had warranties of any kind for years and years and tell them 'your warranty is about to expire'.
They are cold calls. They haven't done any research. Some of the better ones use the same cold reading techniques that psychics do to trick you into thinking they know what they are talking about. They are hoping you are dumb enough to provide the information to them when the call.
They didn't know a thing about your warranty. Or your car. The call folks all the time who either have no cars, or ancient cars that haven't had warranties of any kind for years and years and tell them 'your warranty is about to expire'.
These guys yes. Not all of them. I got a postcard with the make and model of my car and they knew exactly what day the manufacturer's warranty was going to expire. I even bought the car second hand, so it wasn't like the dealer ratted me out. I think it must be DMV records correlated by vin with dealer reported original sales, or possibly just DMV records and assumptions that first registration equals a sale on or about the same day,
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They didn't know, they just guessed.
For example, I got these calls when I had a 2002 Civic, but the car wasn't under my name; I kept getting the calls after I returned the car to my parents and bought myself a 2009 Civic Hybrid... there's no way that's out of warranty already ;) I tried getting someone on the line (to mess with them) after that, but all I got was a perpetually ringing line. Nobody ever answered.
Usually either your bank/car dealership financial office(check the small print) or one of the big 3 credit record places.
I used to maintain a snailmail catalog list, my boss was frequently considering buying access to lists of buyers of related product X or readers of related magazine Y.
When I looked through some of the options you could get from, say, Experian, I was rather amazed. Recently graduated nurses or lawyers in practice for 10+ years. Age x to y, married or not, kids or no kids, own home/renting, bought a luxury/economy car this year, household income in 5k increments, how many times they'd moved.
Freaking specific shit. Didn't beat the ROI on our "please send me your catalog" list, though.
I had a (legit) marketing company tell me I was getting a free watch (for somehow making it through the first round of the [a?] drawing) and three free magazines, so she had me pick three of six or seven magazines. After I picked she mumbled something about how I just needed to subscribe to one of them to get the magazines.
I refused, because I didn't really want them in the first place; I was then informed I would only qualify to get the free watch if I subscribed.
I've never understood why these companies can get away with giving people things in exchange for money but still call the things "free". I guess if you don't actually lie (if the words themselves are true) it's legit?
Somehow I'm not surprised I didn't win the second round of the drawing.
These people robo dialed the hell out of the 202 area code, starting well over a year ago, and not ending until they were busted. I sat in rooms in DC where I'd get this call, and a few minutes later someone else in the room got it, more than once. There were, undoubtedly, many influential federal government employees, Congresspersons, Senators, an White House staffers also victimized by these calls to their cell phones, both government and private. Why did it take this long to put a stop to this? The world may never know.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I worked briefly for a mail order company that dabbled in [legitimate] telemarketing. The trouble is that the phone company won't provide information about whether a particular number is a cell phone or land line. You used to be able to tell, but after number portability went through, you had no way of knowing. We tried not to call them, and if we were told they were cell phones, we would mark them off and never call them again. However, it was impossible to be 100% sure; what was a land line last year could be a cell number this year..
At least that WAS the situation. Things were in rapid flux. I think the larger data warehouses are putting together lists of cell phone numbers, that you can buy and use to suppress those numbers out of your file; but they're not cheap, and they aren't complete.
Most of their people are nuts, but they do have Shepherd Smith who can be pretty cool sometimes (even if he does have a creepy face):
When a commentator next to him said that waterboarding was helping intelligence efforts, he got so angry that he yelled that, "he didn't give a rats ass if it helps" and that, "We are America! We do not FUCKING torture!" (followed by a quiet "oops" a little later).
Here he is mocking Glenn Beck on air.
Kinda off topic, so mod me down if you want, I got karma to spare, but you seemed to indicate you enjoyed messing with these guys, so you might also enjoy one of my favorite pasttimes...messing with 419 Scammers. 419 is the criminal code dealing with Advanced Fee Fraud in Nigeria...long lost relative died and left you millions, you've won the lottery in Nigeria, etc...all that junk you get in your email. It can be a lot of fun to mess with those guys, and the overall goal is to waste their time so they don't scam as many real victims. Most are from West Africa but they can be from anywhere in the world...the number coming from developed nations has increased a lot lately. Check out this site here if it's something you might be interested in trying: www.419eater.com
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The real problem is the government's indifference — took millions of complaints over years for them to enforce the law...
Millions of complaints had nothing to do with it. IIRC, Senator Schumer got one of there calls and the rest is history.
Note to telemarketer: scrub congressmen from phone list.
It wasn't the auto warranty scam, but one of those calls was scarily accurate. My wife had just got off the phone with me telling me that our fridge was leaking water and needed to be replaced. (Came with the house and was quite old so it wasn't completely unexpected.) Literally seconds after I hung up, my work phone rang. "If you own your own home, you need to protect against major appliance failure..." The scammers are spying on me!!!! (Do I need to wrap my phone in tin foil? ;-) )
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.