Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Ideas how to deal with scam calls....

Here are a few ideas for wasting a telemarketers time. Try one of these next time you get a call.

1 – Pretend the connection is bad and you can’t hear them. You can even say things like “I think…. connect…for to….wanted a big…always pay…charge my battery…Can you hear me?” pretending the line is a bad line. Since they’re calling from overseas anyways, this is fairly common. If you can play this game for 3 minutes, you’redoing pretty good.

2 – Talk over them like there’s a delay in the line. As soon as they start to speak, talk over them and tell them there’s a really bad echo on the line. See how long you can keep going that before they hang up on you.

3 – Pretend you’re someone else, like characters from your favorite TV show. Tell them about your day and pretend you’re in the last episode you watched. Most of the people in overseas call centers will have never seen the show, so they’ll have no idea.

4 – Pretend you know the person calling. Act like you were expecting the call and that you think the other person is your friend playing a practical joke on you. “Come on Joe, I know it’s you. Stop with the crazy accent.”

5 – Pretend you’re a telemarketer too. Tell them that this call may be recorded for training purposes. Try to sell them the latest in headset equipment for call centers.

6 – Pretend there are 3 or 4 different people in the house and after they talk for a few minutes, tell them they need to talk to your dad, or your sister or your psychiatrist, or your lawyer.  See how many times you can pass the phone to the “next person”.

7 – Pretend you’re at the office and tell them that a customer just walked in, but you are interested in what they just said. Then put the phone down for 2 minutes.

8 – Just keep asking questions about what they’re trying to sell.

**ALL INFO HAS BEEN COPIED FROM NO-MORE-CALLS! WEBSITE - http://no-more-calls.com/how-to-waste-a-telemarketers-time-2/ **



....and this is why:

How does wasting a telemarketers time cost them money?

Simple. Time is money. The equipment is cheap and the robo-dialer program costs nothing.  They’re in business to make money and when you hang-up on them (or don’t answer the phone), you make them more profitable.
If everyone spent 2 minutes talking to every telemarketer that called them, telemarketing as an industry would go out of business in a few days. If nothing else, wasting their time will increase the odds of actually getting added to their do not call list.
The math of an illegal telemarketing scam is pretty easy – minimize the cost to find a sucker. It works like this:
  • Dial 10,000 phone numbers with auto-dialing equipment at a cost of $0.
  • 1 in 10 people answer, so that’s 1,000 connected calls.
  • The average talk time per call is 10 seconds because most people hang-up.
  • If they pay $5 / hour, then it only costs them about $14 to connect 1,000 calls.
  • If 1 in 1,000 people spend $100 with the telemarketing company, then their profit margin is 86%!
Now, if instead of a 10 second average talk time, we increase the talk time to 2 minutes because everyone wastes their time. The math now looks like this:
  • The average talk time is 120 seconds.
  • If they pay $5 / hour, then it costs them about $170 to connect 1,000 calls.
  • If 1 in 1,000 people spend $100 with the telemarketing company, then they now lose $66 on every order!

** Info copied from http://no-more-calls.com/how-to-waste-a-telemarketers-time/ **

#telemarketers #scam #telemarketing #wasteoftime #phone #phonecalls 

Yet another scam....


Ok....so yet another scam got through my cell.

The guy called at around 1:30PM, from this number: 780-532-1131 showing as a Grand Prairie, Alberta number.

This person called my cell and without introducing himself started saying he is calling on behalf of XYZ (mumbled it so I did not understand) but it was about anti-bullying campaign. Proceeded to ask if they can count on my support. I said no not financially and he proceeded to say it doesn't matter how much I give so I said I am not able to give any money...he still wouldn't give up.. I hate to be rude with anyone but hey, being so pushy will make people feel bullied...just sayin'!
So as much as I am not very comfortable doing this, I ended up cutting him off mid sentence saying "sorry I am really not interested have a great day goodbye" all in one breath and hung up on him.

Interestingly enough someone with the same voice called me before Christmas and it was related to firefighting charity....same script. Just different charity.

So I am putting this number on the "automatically reject list" and I am posting my experience on some of the sites that report on this type of stuff.

Interestingly enough someone on one of those sites mentioned they contacted the Police Services as they were told the call is on their behalf, and Police Services confirmed this was scam.

#scam #antibullying #antibullyingscam #donotcall #phonescam #alberta #callfromGrandPrairie