Yesterday I was assaulted by not one, but two, telephone calls, trying to sell me something. This would not have been unusually odd, but I am on the donotcall.gov registry, and have been since I have lived here. I looked up the donotcall.gov time limit on their service, and it was listed as five years. I have only lived here two years, so this could not be the issue.

Both calls were from Indian people, offering me things in such thick accents, I never understood a word of it. I did catch on the second call, that he knew my address and legal name. The first call was unlisted, the second bore the odd label *United States 8*. The second call had extremely bad reception, with a lot of crackling and the signal was cutting out. They were either calling from out of the country, or had extremely bad VOIP…maybe both.

I threw into Google a variety of search terms, and discovered the truth…I had received phone SPAM from India. Though the second call was a local number listed, it was merely a routing station, to make it appear it was a local call. The *United States 8* was a reference to the different call stations they were keeping. Makes me wonder what other countries they are spamming, as many countries now have their own do not call registries, including India. Can’t SPAM your own country? SPAM another!

A woman wrote into a forum this piece, regarding a similar situation to my own. AtariAmarok replied:

“That sounds like phone spam. Illegal, arrives in garbled format, and from some shady scam outfit that does not want to identify itself.

Reminds of the few times I have received spam advertising products that took the “cover up” aspect too far: the return address was fake, the< name of the product was not in the e-mail, and there was no link or phone # or any way for me to contact them if hell had frozen over and I actually did want to buy their product.”

A later mention in this thread also referred to the probability it was a foreign VOIP line. Then, I found this piece, which described a foreign call, and what happened when he was routed to a supervisor:

“Mr. Hunter,” he greeted me. “So I see your home is worth ….”

Herdon said he was a senior loan officer with Pacific Equity Services, a mortgage broker in Vancouver, Wash. I immediately asked Herndon how he’d gotten my phone number; he was honest with me.

” “We call these ‘India leads,’” he told me. Employees at a call center in India place the calls and then, when a consumer answers, they are transferred to loan officers in the U.S.

When I complained, Herdon referred me to company CEO Rod Santic.

Santic was also honest with me. He said he pays $24 for each “live transfer” of a potential customer.

“It’s like reverse telemarketing,” he said. Instead of paying his own employees to place hundreds of cold phone calls, Santic pays a company in Mumbai, India, for every potential customer they can< successfully transfer to one of his loan officers.”

If only donotcall.gov protected me from this also. It isn’t enough that I receive SPAM in my email box, my cell phone, my mailbox, but now it is on my house phone as well. I just might try one of those call verification systems, because I am really tired of telling people off!

[tags]cell phones, email, email spam, phone spam, phones, India, foreign countries, outsourcing, privacy invasion, call filtering, loan agencies, scams, shadowmyth, lockergnome, telemarketers, [/tags]

Technorati Tags: cell phones, email, email spam, phone spam, phones, India, foreign countries, outsourcing, privacy invasion, call filtering, loan agencies, scams, shadowmyth, lockergnome, telemarketers,

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