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I have been getting calls that immediately start with, "Thank you for choosing Marriot Hotels!" for a couple years now. The message goes on to say how I am getting this great offer because I am a valued customer. On a couple occasions, I stayed on the line to get a human, they ask yes/no questions (are you over 28? do you have a valid credit card?). I just replied with questions of my own, and they immediately hung up. I can continue to ignore the calls, but they are always from a random local number and I get nearly twice as many of these calls than I get legitimate calls.
I did a search and found this has been around for a while and Marriot is aware:
http://news.marriott.com/2015/05/marriott-international-responds-to-continued-phone-scam-updated-oct-20-2015/
I have deliberated about posting, but I don't see the FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] as being able to act unless I can provide them something more than the spoofed phone number. Providing the number(s) probably won't help as they are spoofing the caller ID. I know that this is a long shot, but is there anything anyone can suggest beyond creating a spreadsheet of phone numbers, dates, and times to log these calls? Would that even be useful?
It seems that something is fundamentally broken with the current phone system, if this spoofing is even possible. But that is a side topic here, the real question is, what can I do, if anything, to get the data the FCC would need to shut this down?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shipofgold on Wednesday March 15 2017, @01:49PM
I do this on occasion when I am bored, but the problem is that wasting his time generally is a waste of my time. I normally don't have 45 minutes to string them along.
Before I setup my Asterisk box to avoid them, I use to do "hold on for a second" and log how long it took for them to hang up. Most bailed at around 90 seconds. A couple went to 3-4 minutes after asking "helloooo are you there" to which I would respond: 'yep...just a sec'.
The problem is the grunts at the other end of the call are in most cases just trying to earn a living. There are the occasional malicious ones (This is the IT department and we have detected a problem with your computer), but they are few and far between.
These days I just filter with asterisk and "please press 9 if you are not a computer".