repeated calls offering to lower interest rate
Complaint
max1286
Country: United States
they have been calling me repeatedly from different phone numbers and offering me to lower interest rate on the credit card debt. I do not have credit card debt. I asked them for their names before and they usually hang up right away. They do not give away any information about the company just say its card services company. I repeatedly asked them to stop calling me.
Comments
The robocalls are made to sift through and find likely victims to hand off to "closers".
They have to improve the odds to make it pay, or they wouldn't be making them.
The robocalls cost them virtually nothing, but tie up their people, and they can't swindle someone else.
They are calling and harassing many more people than they have closers, so if even a fraction of those who got harassed, harassed back, they would choke on the wasted time.
Act like a "mark", use an alias, pretend you have a bunch of CC debt ($10k gets them interested), and ask lots of dumb questions about what they will do.
Waste more of their people time than they are wasting of yours.
I use one of the following options when I don't recognize the phone number calling.
1. If you have a fax machine, you can do this as well: when the call comes in, I press the option on my keypad to speak with a representative. I engage them in a bit of friendly conversation/banter while making my way to my fax machine. This is important: speak very quietly so that they must turn up the volume on their phone to hear you. When I think that I've got them, I hit the "transmit now" button on my fax machine and let it kick in. I love hearing them shriek! When they've hung up, I let the fax machine answer all my calls for the next few hours in case I get any callbacks. All of my friends and family know to use my mobile phone to reach me. My "home" phone (land-line) is for emergency calls.
2. I love to engage them in meaningless, friendly conversation about their job, their name, their location, what they like to do when they're not at work, what's their favorite color, how much they make (they usually won't answer this question), how they commute to work, do they have significant others in their lives, are they married, etc. When they get insistent about getting back to business, I sound hurt and tell them that I like to get to know the people that I do business with. This will, sometimes, get them to relent to more questions: I then ask them questions about their business, what their company is called, if they like what they're doing with their lives, etc. This really extends the call from a few seconds to well over 5-10 minutes. Now, I'm pretty sure these people are paid to wrap things up as quickly as they can -- and I'm sure they are being audited by their supervisors -- so they, usually, start to get antsy and try to get me back into the "swing of things" by returning to the subject of their call. This is when I start in about "finding God," learning how to swim, my last summer vacation, etc. Again, it's filler and it's made-up but they just can't get me back to the subject. Usually, by this point, they hang up. If you waste 10-minutes or more of their time, they usually get into trouble with their supervisors.
3. I love to ask them crazy questions after a little friendly chit-chat. Once, while speaking with a young man, I asked him, quite politely, if he had ever hit someone with a hammer. The man was quiet. I then told him about how my abductor would hurt me and how I wished that I could hit him with a hammer. Usually this ends up either freaking them out. Sometimes, after making strange confessions, I resort to the old fax machine connection (see number one above) to end the call on a high note.
4. Sometimes, for days/weeks at a time, I leave the fax machine to answer all of my calls. Usually ends up quiet for a couple of weeks after that.
5. Sometimes, I push the option to speak with someone and then put the phone down and play some music or a TV show on my computer -- porn works well too.
6. I've saved the best for last: get to a representative and then take them to your bathroom to hear you do your business.
I hope this helps someone out there. I know how frustrating it is. Since our government is innefectual at routing these [***], it's up to us to get creative and make it a sport.
They're never gonna get you to purchase anything or do anything that they want: why not have some fun?
Finally I told her--politely--that I had thought about their offer and had no intention of dealing with her, just wanted to see how much of her time I could waste. This brought a quick good-bye!