Those Pesky Robo Calls

Would you like to have a nice quiet evening at home?  Well you can’t!  You can’t because some telemarketer with an auto-dialed, recorded message will interrupt you.  If you’re lucky, it will only be once.

Almost every day I receive 3 or 4 phone calls from people who offer me my last chance to lower the interest rate on my credit cards or who tell me I’ve won a cruise or who want to sell me magazines or insurance or burial plots or hearing aids.   These calls come day and night and can make me really cranky because they interrupt what I’m doing.  Even if I’m doing nothing, that doesn’t give those automatic dialers the right to interrupt my nothingness.  Particularly since most of these calls are not from reputable companies.

I once pressed ‘1’ to speak with a representative when I received my 500^th call (ok, so maybe it wasn’t 500, but it felt like it was) from one of the ‘lower your credit card interest rate to six percent’ people.  He asked for my credit card number and I asked the representative which credit card he was calling about as I have six.  I lied, I only have two, but why tell him that?  He hung up on me.  Imagine that!  After all, if he was calling to lower my interest rate, it would stand to reason that he had my card number, right?  I later heard on our local TV station that you should never press 1 to speak to a representative.  Oh well.

Now when I see a call coming from an unfamiliar number, I go to the computer and Google the number.  There is always a list of sites, such as whocallsme.com, where I can see what other people have to say about calls from that same number.  Most often the number is from the lower your interest rate scam.  And, from what I’ve read, if you call back, you’ll get a message telling you that number you dialed is not in service.

I finally got fed up and I decided to try something.  When I got one of those calls, I added the number to my cell phone’s contact list, named it ‘Junk’ and give it a number like ‘Junk 5’ (or whatever number you want.  So far I have 54 of these numbers in my contact list.)  Then I set the ring tone to ‘no ring’.  Viola!  They can call until the proverbial cows come home and it’s not going to bother me.  If your phone doesn’t have the ‘no ring’ option, set it for ‘low beep once’ or the shortest ring you have available to you.   I tried ‘low beep once’ and I barely heard it.  When I did hear it, I knew it was one of those calls and could ignore it without a second thought.

The Do Not Call Lists don’t help with these calls.  They are robo calls.  The numbers are dialed by an automated system that calls numbers in sequence.  All of our telephone numbers are on both the national and state Do Not Call lists, even our cell phones.   It doesn’t matter.  Nothing stops these people/companies/scammers.  So if these calls bother you, get pro-active.  Take things into your own hands.  Take your cell phone into your own hands and add those numbers to your contacts so that when they call again you won’t be tempted to answer.  Ahhhh, the quiet….