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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @02:59PM
In any case, the caller had finally had enough. I guess a half-hour was the most they were willing to spend, and they hung up on me. But the interesting part is that the number of calls I've gotten since then has been way down. Maybe it's just a blip in the statistics, but I'm sure hoping it's because someone set a "pain in the ass" bit on my profile.
Many of the scams are really coming out of a small number of call centers so once you annoy one into submission you'll see a massive decrease in calls. The last time I was getting these (around the same time every day, never leaves a voice mail, etc.) I was out mowing the lawn so I answered it and then put the phone next to the lawnmower engine for half a minute. They never bothered me again.