Until recently I owned a mobile home. That means you pay county taxes and your name shows up on the public records. A handful for asshole operations troll those records for names and numbers of people who would never call them and have no use whatsoever for whatever it is they are selling. But then they sell those numbers to even more aggressive outfits that use robocalling, and even spoof their numbers so you can’t complain to the FTC.
The vendor of ill repute here is ADT Home Security Systems. They seldom do their own sales calls any more, passing it off to contractors who get a fee for referral, I suppose. At any rate, some of those contractors are psychopaths. Over the past couple of months as I wound down my ownership of that residence and moved out of it, the calls actually got worse.
If they call you, most likely it starts with those oddball electronic cues to warn you that the machine on the other end is waiting for you to pick up the phone and say “hello.” If you say nothing, it will eventually hang up. Once they register a human voice, a recording begins. “Good morning (afternoon/evening), this is Jonathan with home security….” But there’s no Jonathan there, just a recording. After hearing a portion of the spiel, I looked up the key words under robocalling and found out it was a lead marketer for ADT. Since that time, I simply hang up every time I hear that recording.
A week ago that robocalling system went ballistic on me. It called 3 or 4 times daily. It escalated until it was eight calls in one day. I decided it was time to hunt down someone at ADT. The website says little or nothing useful, because all they want is for you to call their salesman and force you to hear their spiel one more time before lying about not calling you again. And if you know something about checking who owns a website and how to contact them, you’ll discover their website has a blind registration through a proxy to prevent you knowing.
Using my Internet sleuthing skills, I eventually found an email address reported by one of the BBB sites in their home state. It was worth a shot.
In sum, I told the recipient that I live in an apartment and I felt this was abusive. Someday in the future when I want to consider home security systems, I won’t do business with anyone who can’t secure me against phone calls from ADT. That got a response. I was referred to the “ADT Do Not Contact” team. Gave them my phone number and I haven’t heard from any robocallers in several days now.
Psst: It’s jracz at adt dot com
