Wave after wave of telemarketers assault your household like it was a Normandy beachhead. Bleary-eyed, you tell your coke-bottle glassed, coupon-clipping, twine-saving friend over a cup of coffee at Denny’s. He intones nasally, “You know, you could sign up for the Federal Do-Not-Call List. That way, scrupulous telemarketers won’t call you. And if any unscrupulous ones do, you have the basis for making an official complaint to the FCC.”
telemarketing
Cablevision Won’t Take No Answer For An Answer
By 8.31.06
This is the log of calls Brian has received from 516-393-0168.
Reader Gets Scammed For $1000’s in Bogus Magazine Subscriptions
By 8.9.06
Anya responded to a telemarketer’s call 2 years ago and bought some magazine subscriptions. She thought she was going to pay “somewhere between 14 and 44 dollars a month,” and paid with her debit card.
AOL Still Retaining Like A MoFugger
By 8.3.06
AOL may be free, but that didn’t stop them from calling up Matt W. in Chicago, begging him to come back. The rep offered Matt a “new” version of AOL called, “Security Edition.” After an initial “trial period,” Matt could continue using AOL for $9.95/month.
FCC Investigates Calls From a Stranger
By 7.22.06
The second of two blows dealt this week to the Miami telemarketers autodialing people’s cellphones and trying to scam them. It seems the FCC is actually looking into the matter. All it took was a few months, Verizon to file an injunction, and a few gajillion consumer complaints, like those by reader Chris.
Top Stories of The Week
By 7.21.06
• Scientologists Bullying Man’s Mind. The most pitiful thing is that these guys probably paid a lot of money to learn how to be complete dicks.
Spanish Tele-Scammer’s Pinata Busted by Verizon
By 7.20.06
Back in April, we were obsessed by a Miami telemarketing company scamming people, in Spanish, on their cellphones, using a robotic autodialer. After pounding the e-pavement, our efforts to angle in on the bastiches fizzled, since we were neither a telephone company processing the calls, nor an aggrieved recipient, we couldn’t do much about it, except advise people to report it to the police. Just last week we received a few complaints.
The Second Greatest Thing We’ve Ever Posted: Crazy Cat Lady Telemarketing Call
By 7.18.06
Okay, we hate telemarketers plenty. But this woman might be taking the entire thing too far.
Boiler Room Made Flesh
By 6.13.06
So, we put out the call for something as good as the AOL cancel call. Mark steps up with a link to his buddy Aaron’s site who hosts a call between himself and a Boiler Room type crapola stock seller, Josh.
Calls From a Stranger, No More
By 6.12.06
Well, at least it will now be illegal. Last week, the House passed H.R. 5126, The Truth in Caller I.D. Act, outlawing misrepresenting one’s identity on caller ID, colloquially known as “caller ID spoofing.”
Consolidated Media Services Scams “Subscribers”
By 1.3.06
ConsumerAffairs.com warns of Consolidated Media Services, a magazine-subscription telemarketing service that is unscrupulously scamming hundreds of dollars from customers who never subscribed to their publications to begin with:
