Carmen from Cardholder Services calls me daily. Carmen is an automated voice so we really don’t have a conversation and I don’t consider her a friend. In fact, I really dislike her so I always hang up as soon as I hear, “This is Carmen…” but by then it’s too late — my work has been interrupted.
So when I saw an article in the April 8, 2015 issue of The Petoskey News-Review titled “Can phone companies do more to block robocalls?” with accompanying facts about those annoying robocalls, I couldn’t read it fast enough.
Bingo — they mentioned Carmen from Cartholder services and followed that saying the automated voice recording encourages listeners (obviously I’ve never listed long enough) to press a number that connects them with someone who promises to lower their interest rates in exchange for an upfront fee. This is a total scam. While the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is studying this problem and has no real solutions yet, the article did offer some things everyone should know:
1) Sales robocalls are almost always a scam. Robocalls to your landline are only allowed from political campaigns, charities, debt collectors, survey takers and information services such as your pharmacy or school. So if you get a robocalls selling a product or claiming that a product has been purchased for you, hang up immediately.
2) The scam. Scanners like to pretend they are conducting a survey or representing a charity before connecting you with a live operator who will try to sell you something. That’s still illegal. Some also pretend to be from the IRS or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, rambling off fake badge numbers and trying to scare people into thinking they will be audited or deported unless they pay a fee or divulge banking information.
3) Don’t press “1.” Pressing any number, even if it suggests that doing so will take you off their list, only confirms your number is working and that they have reached a live person. Engaging the call in any way will just lead to more calls.
4) Caller id means nothing. It’s called “spoofing,” and it prevents you from knowing where the call is really coming from. You can ask your phone company to block a particular number. But by the time you do that, the same scammers will probably move on to a different number. Your own phone number can even appear on the caller ID, whereas the call might be coming from overseas.
5) Register your number on the ‘do not call’ list. But don’t expect too much. Scammers ignore the registry so it’s unlikely to stop the problem. But at least then you’ll know that every time you get a call, and it’s not a political campaign, survey or charity, it’s a scam. Under the rules, a company can only call you if you have an “established business relationship.” Even in that case, it has to be a live sales call, ot a robocall. Follow this link to register your number on the ‘do not call’ list: https://www.donotcall.gov/
Thanks to the Petoskey News Review for providing these facts. Why should you use them? Any telephone call interrupts your work and interruptions reduce your productivity. That translates to getting less work done and reducing the number of billable hours you have to record.
There are more hints for stopping interruptions and getting more work done in my manual, Simple Strategies for Organizing Your Workspace. For more information, follow this link: http://paralegalmentor.com/simple-strategies-for-organizing-your-workspace.
How do you handle robocalls? Be sure to leave a comment!