Thursday, September 24, 2009

Erica with Credit Card Services Part I

Just about every day, I get a call from 228-209-9560 (also seen from 310-485-8993, 402-982-0745 and 702-705-5039) offering to lower my interest rates on my credit cards. It starts like this: "Hi, this is Erica with credit card services. Don't be alarmed, there's nothing wrong with your account..." and so on. At the end of the recording she says press 2 to be removed from the list (which just disconnects the line and you continue to receive the calls) or press 1 to talk to a representative.

Since they won't stop calling, I decided to start having some fun. It's not very interesting yet, but I have plans.

Today's call:

Me: "Could you remove me from your calling list?"
Guy: "What size screen is it? Yeah. [I don't think he heard me at this point?] How much do you owe on credit cards?"
Me: "One hundred thousand dollars."
Guy: "A hundred thousand? Do you know the interest rate on these?"
Me: "Yeah, I think it's 32%." [which puts the minimum payment somewhere around $3500]
Guy: "And are you keeping up with these payments?"
Me: "Oh, yeah, no problem. Could you remove me from your calling list?"
Guy: "Nope. Not when you're being a wise-ass!"

Then he hung up. My phone number is on the FCC's Do Not Call Registry, so these guys are obviously crooks who don't really care to remove me from their list.

So what's my plan? If they insist on wasting my time, I'm at least going to make an investment in it. I will start making up some fake information to use on every call I get and waste as much of their time as I can.

I'll be the extremely enthusiastic guy who might have a little crush on every operator that calls him...those little cuties.

3 comments:

BHSPitMonkey said...

You can try reporting them at 1-877-FTC-HELP. Oh, and you should be recording the prank calls.

Kim Allen said...

I started receiving spam texts once, directing me to some website... I did some digging around, found the company's real contact info, reported them to the FCC, then sent them a nasty email telling them I reported them to the FCC and that the FCC would be investigating. And surprisingly, that actually worked. I got a series of frantic phone messages from the company saying they had removed me from their text list, that I was mistakenly subscribed, etc. You should definitely try it.

scotglen said...

We have 100 phone numbers in our DID that all re-direct to a central phone number. We get anywhere from 10-15 calls from "Erica" every day. It drives us nuts!

I have taken a similar approach. I have asked our customer service representatives to press the option that connects us to a live person, they then ask if they can put them on hold while they get the owner on the line to talk to them. We then leave them on hold for as long as possible.

If anyone knows who this company really is or where they are based, etc. - that info would really help.