Thursday, August 25, 2022

The Thursday Ramble: I am calling about your car warranty that is about to expire

I recently read that the Attorney General of Ohio, is making headway at shutting down the major robocall operation on extended car warranties. If you have a phone in the United States, you have gotten the calls, often several in the same day, saying we noticed your car warranty is about to expire, or may have recently expired and this is your last chance to reinstate or extend it.  At the peak, it was estimated that they were making 100,000,000 calls a day.  That is a couple of calls a week to every woman, man, and child in the country.  Endlessly annoying.   

Most of it is controlled by two scumbag partners, most often in California. They have a nearly impenetrable network of shell companies and limited partnerships, many of them with links outside the country, making it harder to prosecute, or recover money.  Law enforcement often gets an order for them to cease operations - they simply shut down that corporation, and use another one with hardly a break.  They have been fined over $120,000,000. And they keep coming back.  

The premise of the calls creates a legal cause of action, what they are selling is a service contract, not a car warranty. Those are technically different things, and lawyers love mincing over words.  

The calls violate the Federal No-Call list.  Most of the cease and desist orders and fines have been based on violations of the no-call laws.  But that does not stop them from moving to the next identity. And Congress didn't make willing and repeated violation a criminal act, lock-em-up.

So what next.  Phone service providers.  Phone service providers can lose their license to operate for knowingly facilitating violation of federal laws. That can make it hard for scammers to find a phone service provider. 

In the early days of wireless phones, hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny local providers were licensed to provide cell service.  Often in small towns that the big name providers hadn't reached yet.  Over time the big providers covered the market, often simply squeezing the little guys out of business, only the more successful ones were bought out.  The little ones became worthless, but often retained their registration as a phone service provider.  One never knows.  

The scammers know, and they buy the license.  The licenses are considered worthless, and can often be bought for very little.  And suddenly a phone service provider in town with 100 people, that had no active lines, has a 10,000 lines connected to it, and is handling 60,000 outgoing calls an hour. The state and the feds have figured out the way to shut down the robocallers, is to shut down their phone provider, by cancelling it's license and disconnecting it from the grid.  

Advances in technology have made it possible to identify the originating provider in seconds, instead of hours - or days - or weeks. 

Shutting down the one group, will shut down over 80% of the calls.  There will be others. And the same strategy will work.  Until they figure out the next way around the system.  

 
 

15 comments:

  1. What is exactly is in the water? Looks like a few bites were taken out of it.

    The phone calls? Pain. I never answer my cell unless the number is in my contacts. Otherwise, it goes to voicemail if important.

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  2. Oh those robo calls! Is that a seal in the water? An otter? Something that’s been attacked? A robo caller perhaps?

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  3. Anonymous8/25/2022

    Our phone companies seem to having some success at stopping scammers at least. I don't really answer the phone if it doesn't show who is calling with a name. What is happening in the US sounds promising.

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    1. It has been a political fight, phone marketers are afraid of losing business and phone companies wanted the network traffic, but that left the door open for the criminals and scammers

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  4. I just don't understand how people will sign up for something or buy something over the phone from some robocall.

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    1. I agree, the scammers are professionals

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  5. Interesting. Most of the scam robocalls in Canada originate from outside our country. That's how they evade Canadian laws and law enforcement. We don't have the car warranty scam here (insofar as I know). Many of our scam calls purport to be from the government threatening jail or legal action for unpaid taxes, etc. I never answer the phone if caller ID shows it's an unknown number. If it's a legit call, they'll leave a non-robocall message.

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    1. The tax scam has been widespread here.

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  6. You have described one of my pet peeves. I used to get those warranty calls all the time. The one that said my computer virus protection was expired was the most annoying. They would call sometimes 6 times a day. That one was so clearly a scam that I often thought what's the point.

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    1. If they reach one person an hour that falls for it, it makes a profit.

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  7. I get those calls all the time, and my car is still under warranty!

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    1. My car is so old, but only has 50,000 miles on it

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  8. I sense this is a never ending losing battle to pass laws and people get around them. unless we stop responding to them.

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