SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the fighting-the-most-hated-industry dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
The Guardian gives us an article about one woman fighting back against the ever more invasive robocall.
Many people dislike receiving robocalls. Araceli King disliked receiving 153 of them from a single company.
Time Warner Cable Inc must pay the insurance claims specialist $229,500 for placing 153 automated calls meant for someone else to her cellphone in less than a year, even after she told it to stop, a Manhattan federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
King, of Irving, Texas, accused Time Warner Cable of harassing her by leaving messages for Luiz Perez, who once held her cellphone number, even after she made clear who she was in a seven-minute discussion with a company representative.
The calls were made through an "interactive voice response" system meant for customers who were late paying bills.
The article doesn't say if Luiz Perez paid his bill yet.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by skater on Thursday July 09 2015, @12:19PM
She's lucky - she was able to pin down one company and sue them. I bought and moved into my house over 9 years ago, and I still get calls (we just had one yesterday, in fact) from collections agencies that are trying to contact the previous residents of the house. They had a different phone number, but the agencies look up the address and get the "new" phone number, then call it.
And even if I go to the trouble of calling one of them and saying, "Hey, they don't live here," another ham-and-egg collection agency will soon buy the bad debt, and then THEY start calling me. So, it's an unending cycle. We don't even bother answering the landline any more - we just let the machine get it every time (the most important people have our cell numbers anyway). None of the individual agencies are doing anything wrong, but as a whole, the industry is.
We don't want to give up the landline completely, because it is nice to have a number for calls you want to receive but not while you're out and about (I don't really need to talk to, say, my colleges looking for donations while I'm in the car, for example). I'm wondering if I changed my number and paid for it to be unlisted (a rip, I know, but the peace could be worth it), would the collection agencies still get it?
Side note, kind of funny but mostly irritating: The latest round of robocalls for the previous resident say something like, "If you are (previous resident's name), question mark pound sign less than equals." I.e., the script for the call is messed up and the agency has no idea, so even if I wanted to call that agency and tell them to stop calling, I can't. Or if I were the owner of the debt and wanted to call to resolve it, I wouldn't be able to do that, either. (Caller ID might work, but it's often hidden or spoofed.)
(Score: 1) by Wierd0n3 on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:51PM
what about the line disconnected tone as your answering machine message? i just have the 3 tones at the start of mine, and it worked for about 95% of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BVbyCZXc5s [youtube.com]