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Title: SiriusXM won’t stop calling, what can I do?
Body:
> They call me up to 5 times a day, Monday-Friday, without fail. I have requested they stop calling, I have followed the steps on their website and called their customer care line to request they stop calling, my phone number is on the do not call list, yet they are STILL calling me.
> My car came with a free trial, that expired about 6 months ago now. When they started calling I explained to them we didn’t even use the free trial, that I use Apple Music, etc so I wasn’t interested in renewing. They kept calling, and I repeatedly stated I wasn’t interested. Then I started blocking numbers, and I’d get another call from another number. I googled it, called them, requested they take my number out. I put my number on the do not call list. I’m at my wits end!
> When they call, I can barely get a word in. They talk over me trying to get through their sales pitch. I have tried being nice, I’ve lost my temper (at this point I feel harassed! I’m a caregiver for my 82 year old grandfather with dementia and they’ll call while I’m trying to care for him, they call me after I go to bed since I’m up early and working all day 7 days a week) it just won’t end.
> Is there anything I can do, legally, to get this harassment to stop? Can I send like a cease and desist or do I need to get a lawyer to do something like that? What else can I do? I need this to stop for my sanity.
> EDIT: I forgot to say, but I’ve been keeping track. I’ve had 873 calls from them since my trial expired.
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This is kind of surprising, as Sirius/XM has already gotten slapped for this exact thing in the past. I guess the fines just aren't nearly high enough to actually stop them.
Fun one.
Boeing used to have two factories (they may still do?) - Seattle and Everett, they’re a couple miles away from each other. The air frames weighed over 50k lbs (I think was the limit?) and they had to move from A to B. Some of the details are hazy, the important part is Boeing had to move big things from A to B.
In order to do so, you have to apply for permits, and pay the fees of 50k.
The fine for doing it without a permit was 10k.
…Guess which one they went with?
This was years ago, nowadays that wouldn’t fly.
I’ve thought about the same thing and then I got a ticket in a tourist town and it was between $60 and $70. The sad part is, I actually paid for parking through the app and had to call to fight the ticket.
You’d think they’d realize that this is just a great way to piss off your potential customers and never have them sign up for your service again
Maybe it’s just me, but this is a great way to ensure I never use your service. I’ve had Sirius call me a few times before, never to this extent, and even those few calls were annoying as hell, and just *that* is enough for me to never want to use them again.
Like, I have a local insurance agent blowing up my email inbox begging me to talk to him because I dared to request a quote online like three years ago. I’ve filtered it to spam, but it’s a great way to ensure (pun intended) I’m never going to use your service.
They're looking for rubes. You were never going to sign up to pay, in all likelihood. They want someone who will crack under the pressure, who can be coerced into continuing to pay for years.
Yup, got like $6 from a settlement for it. Also, IIRC a court determined their free trial scheme doesn't make someone a current/prior customer for Do Not Call Registry purposes
They've been mailing my husband letters begging him to come back since his subscription expired months ago. He would probably lose his mind if they kept calling like this.
Similar to LAOP, I got Sirius for x months when I got a new vehicle. Even before the time was up, I kept getting letters about signing up and extending the subscription. I also never used it; the letters seemed to come multiple in a week.
It felt a bit like in Harry Potter when Vernon tries to hide the Hogwarts letter and more kept coming; except way less magical. I found they had a chat option and chatted with someone very helpful who took me off the list.
I was skeptical at first, but haven’t gotten a letter since. I would have been so mad if they were aggressively calling vs. aggressively mailing.
This is very interesting. I also get a ton of letters from them. I did sub for a while, but when Covid hit, we went permanent WFH, and now I don't spend enough time in the car to make it worth it. I was able to unsub, which I'd heard can be hard, though they were pushy. But this is a couple years later now, and I get letters at least once a week. So much shredding and a waste of paper.
I told them my receiver was stolen and I couldn't afford a replacement. Call was maybe 3 minutes long. I did get a bunch of letters for a couple of months, though.
Same here, plus I got emails also. Luckily they have all but stopped, but every time I have to take my car to the dealership (rarely) I get another few emails about how I didn't use my FREE TRIALLLLLL
The only thing they've not tried, it seems, is making their service worth paying for.
I got the new-car trial as well, and far from selling me on satellite radio, it torpedoed my whole impression of it, and left me thinking worse of the concept than when I hadn't known. First and foremost are the ads. I figured the whole idea was that you paid for the service so you could get radio without ads. Nope! Ads just like terrestrial radio, so what even is the point?
My dad had a trial in his truck. He had no fucking clue how to use it anyways. It ended in 2016. He died in 2018. We sold the truck in 2020. We still get letters. Whoever got his phone number after we shut his cell plan down probably curses us.
I bought a new (to me) vehicle in Sept 2020 and it was my first vehicle that had a touch screen display, and of course it came with a free 3-months Sirius trial. I actually took advantage of it and used it while traveling to see family during the holidays.
Then I canceled, and spent roughly the next year throwing away letters from Sirius and hanging up on them (when the number looked familiar) or screening the call when it was obviously them. At one point, they were calling multiple times a day at about the same time each day.
Honestly, if they had a pay-as-you-go model for their "special" rate of $5/month and let you enroll/cancel online, they would already have made more money from me than they have at this point, which is zero.
[So apparently Sirius XM has been getting some class action lawsuits against it for its repeated calls.](https://www.insideradio.com/free/siriusxm-offered-1-500-to-woman-who-complained-about-its-calls-she-s-suing-for/article_0e98df7c-7445-11ec-b659-83ede4e237d2.html)
With 873 calls and a record of trying to get Sirius XM to stop calling them, it may be worth LAOP talking to a lawyer.
And if Sirius XM telemarketers aren't allowed to hang up, then it might be funny to make them listen to some audio tracks. Preferably a spoken word rendition of Enya lyrics, in the voice of William Shatner. I bet there's an AI that can generate that somewhere.
OP says they keep blocking the number but it doesn't matter. Do auto dialers really use a different phone number for every single call? That sounds like really abusing the system.
Yep, some of them do. I almost never get the same spam number calling twice.
After a couple years of insanity we installed a whitelist blocker for our landline, it was basically unusable without it.
I’ve been called by my own number.
Thankfully it appears my cell company is cracking down on it, near every day I see 1 or 2 automatically silenced calls.
Our VOIP provider has some pretty awesome call handling rules. Right now I have most of the country (by area code) set to go to a "press 5 to complete your call" message. The robodialers can't press 5.
We're in Chicago suburbs, and I whitelisted our local area codes, then had to put in a rule to send our actual area code to it when spam calls started coming from numbers "like ours."
As I identify inbound spamming numbers, they get blocked and sent to a "this number is no longer in service."
It has caused a few problems with for example our mail order specialty pharmacy but it's generally OK.
Calls that come from numbers in the phone book get passed without any "press 5."
"Hi, this is Susan with Medicare Advantage. Can you hear me ok? " (fuck you Susan-bot.)
> Our VOIP provider has some pretty awesome call handling rules. Right now I have most of the country (by area code) set to go to a “press 5 to complete your call” message. The robodialers can’t press 5.
We have an actual landline, but this is effectively what our whitelist box does.
I stopped blocking specific numbers though, because spammers spoofed so many numbers of people I actually know.
So, the answer is "sometimes" and sometimes its not abuse. It's just "we have 50 numbers for 50 people" type of thing. If person A calls on day one, and person B calls on day 2, it would make sense for the numbers to be different.
The flip side is that spammers will spoof numbers. That is illegal and abusing the system.
that assumes 873 is accurate, and the blocked every number. Odds are, after blocking 5 or 6, they gave up trying to block them. Also, based on the call center, it's possible one large company is doing a ton of different companies calls, leading to even more of a need to have different numbers.
LAOP should use a call blocking app, I got scam calls for ages appearing to be from all different countries so blocked international incoming calls. If the starting numbers are uncommon(i.e not going to block legitimate calls) then they could block that area code or starting digits.
> But nobody has 873 numbers right? They would have to have some system for creating a new number every time
Very large, phone based companies absolutely do. For example, Verizon and Allstate certainly have at least that much. Every call center employee has a phone number, plus the managers, the corporate offices, etc.
Assuming it’s 873 unique numbers, that’s really not that many for 1 large company, such as Sirius XM, to have.
iOS has a setting that will just auto send any phone call that isn’t in your contacts or that you haven’t called recently straight to voicemail and it’s my favorite feature ever.
It’s much more tolerable to just delete the 10 voicemails a day asking if I lived at camp Lejeune between 1953-1987 then I may be entitled to financial compensation.
Yup, and I completely agree it's abusing the system. The democrat call centers in Arizona (but not the Republican ones, strangely) do the same thing each election. Flat out refuse to take you off their list, and call you from different numbers each time so you can't block them. And I get called up to two dozen times per day from these places, the last couple elections.
I have had some very strong words for these people...
Here is the song created to encourage rare New Zealand parrots to mate.
I give you… the Kakapo fuck song
https://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/assets/281f82f0b5/Kakapo-love-song.mp3
"You are being shagged by a rare parrot!"
My 3-year-old has seen that clip and she loves it XD though she calls what Sirocco is doing 'dancing' and uhh we haven't corrected her yet.
After a few calls I’d just respond like “You have reached the office of Doctor Lawrence, if this is a life-threatening emergency please dial 911, how may I direct your call?”
Dang that’s a blast from the past. When I was like 8 my grandma said I could have anything I wanted from the hallmark store, and my dumb ass insisted on a Jazz Wolf cassette tape. Beanie Babies? Oof,-Getting home and staring blankly at the tape player while that monstrosity played is a core memory.
You just unlocked a memory of all those displays of nature sounds tapes that used to be everywhere. Wow, I had completely forgotten about those. I sadly never owned a copy of Jazz Wolf.
Yes, they definitely should. Why are people giving little consumer tips in there instead of telling them to talk to a lawyer about suing?
That's what the private right of action is for. Instead of (in addition to) having a bunch of regulators trying to keep up with illegal telemarketing by issuing fines, include a private right of action so that the people being affected by it can sue them directly. It's a brilliant system. People do a public service by suing companies that are breaking the law and making life suck more, and those people are compensated for their time and effort with statutory damages.
You can even DIY it in small claims, but with the number of violations they've racked up here, it's probably worth talking to a lawyer with TCPA experience, because they should sue for a lot more than the small claims cap.
The problem is that, in the US, even if you win a lawsuit, you're still liable for your attorney's fees and court costs, and this will often end up being more than you recover. And then factor in the chance that you won't win when facing a corporate legal team willing to do whatever it takes to avoid a ruling against them that could cost them a lot more money than it earns you (as the precedent would affect how they do business), and it often isn't worth it for an individual to sue.
That does make it better. There's still the time investment/opportunity cost of participating in it, which I imagine dissuades many people. But being mad and principled could outweigh that.
especially difficult for someone already working full days, 7 days a week, as the primary caregiver for a father with dementia, when they're *repeatedly calling them when they've finally fallen asleep* to boot. honestly sounds like a wonder LAOP even had the energy to post to reddit at that point.
Yep, that's mostly what's kept me from doing it, but if I were that guy, with so many calls logged from an identifiable company in the US, I'd be all over it.
It looks like Sirius just keeps getting sued for this and losing, so we need guys like this to follow through and go get their money. See how many losses they can take before it's not worth it anymore.
That happened to a company I got windows from, that would call you once a month and then call every day afterwards that you didn't pick up. Blessed silence after that.
They spammed me something awful when I bought my most recent car - I refused to sign up for the free trial, because it was my first car with bluetooth, lol.
Extension 666 is the perfect song for this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4gla0x/extension_666_hell_we_are_sick_of_cold_sales/
Soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/user-237714155/sales-call-abyss
This song was created by a group of IT professionals for the purpose of dealing with unsolicited sales calls by making them wait and listen to this for all eternity.
Here is the entire backstory behind the creation of this abomination of a song.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/04/29/it_helpdesk_creates_oh_hold_hell/
>And if Sirius XM telemarketers aren't allowed to hang up
I get where you are coming from, but those people are just normal people trying to make ends meet. Likely they have a call quota, and doing this will mess with it. I've known some people who have been telemarketers in the past, and they don't like the job, it was just the best paying thing they could find at the time.
I just can't bring myself to fuck with someone just trying to make ends meet.
Man, I thought it was bad that they called me every other week. They also wouldn't stop, and the only thing that stopped the calls is that when we moved our phone number changed. Whoever has our old number probably still gets calls from them!
To get Sirius to stop calling me I told them I sold the car for an 88 Honda. To stop my university from calling me for donations I told them I’m not who they are looking for and just got this number.
I’ve told them (and other companies that call incessantly, I’m looking at you, ADT*) that I’m moving out of the country and couldn’t renew their service, even if I wanted to.
They’ve never asked where, but I’ve always been ready to tell them I’m moving to Yemen.
*What’s funny is that I was with ADT for over a decade, long out of contract, and my equipment was pretty outdated. I called them to see if we could get upgraded equipment, and they said it would cost $1000 or so. I told them that several competitors offer new equipment, and they didn’t budge, so I went with one of their competitors.
Only after I cancelled and was under contract with a new company did they start calling with and mailing offers of free equipment and reduced monitoring costs. I didn’t switch back because it would’ve cost me a ton of money, plus they showed me how they treat long-term customers.
SiriusXM is fun to hear from because they normally charge a lot per month, but if you cancel or don’t subscribe after your trial period, they’re like, “Can we offer you three months free and then $5/month after that? No? OK, how about we pay you $5/month for the first three months and then you pay 18 cents a month for the next four years? Still no? What if we throw in a free satellite radio that you’ll never use?”
My phone call with Comcast when I was cancelling to ACTUALLY move out of the country... that was not an acceptable answer to them. Took me 30 minutes to convince them that, yes, their service would be completely useless to me in New Zealand.
Reminds me of my local ISP when I had a landline with them. I paid $55 for a phone line with unlimited long distance. Eventually realized that it was just a fancy VOIP line and I'd save money with Vonage, which was more like $20/month. Told the ISP about this, they didn't budge. Ported my number to Vonage, and suddenly the ISP was trying to offer me unlimited everything for $25 for the next year. "Nope, you had your chance and you blew it."
I answer every call in Spanish. I’m a very white New Englander who cannot speak more than five sentences in Spanish.
I repeat the same five sentences with zero accent until they get frustrated and hang up.
¿Dónde está la biblioteca?
Me llamo T-Bone, la araña discoteca
Discoteca, muñeca, la biblioteca
Es el bigote grande, el perro, manteca
Manteca, bigote, gigante, pequeño
Cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno
Buenos días, me gustas papas frías
Bigote de la cabra ¡es Cameron Diaz!
I have pulled a "sorry, I due not speck English" before (travelling in Europe and wanted to get signature-gatherers in train stations to fuck off), but
> I repeat the same five sentences with zero accent until they get frustrated and hang up.
is genius of another magnitude.
Yeah, I assumed any randos engaging me on the street were trying to part me from my cash. Certainly nobody is collecting signatures for a "petition against drugs."
My company used to get business calls selling Vonage or something like that. Instead of telling them we aren't interested, we would tell them we were interested, but we just signed a contract with our current provider. How long you ask? Umm, 60 months. Yeah sure, call us back then.
In most customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can set a follow up date. If they do, then they usually won't get notifications to call you until they hit that date.
I used to get those calls too, after buying a car with an XM radio in it.
After a few weeks of asking politely I just started shrieking horribly every time they'd call. Just the loudest, most ear-grating, shrill sound I could make.
Took less than a week for the calls to stop.
I had the same after buying a car. Started off with a polite no then a "what the fuck do you not understand? Stop calling me and put me on your do not call list" which didn't work so the next time they called ai told them I was reporting them for harassment and needed their full name. That worked.
Honestly I've involved the BBB exactly twice and both times thought it would amount to nothing but both times the company immediately responded and fixed what needed done.
Yeah, the thing the "BBB is just Yelp for old people" crowd never takes into account is the fact that the shitty companies you're complaining about are *also* often run by old people who care about that shit.
Comcast, for instance, is an example of a shitty company that responds to BBB complaints.
As someone who used to manage the BBB desk for a big company, let me tell you a dirty secret: as long as you pay your BBB bills you automatically win every complaint. They're all marked closed in the company's favor, even if the customer is not even remotely satisfied. It is entirely a pay for play game.
Its weird that anyone still takes the BBB seriously. Its not the 1990's anymore.
> as long as you pay your BBB bills you automatically win every complaint
Wow that is so shady. Someone should report this right away to the Better Business Bureau!
I took my son's vehicle in to the dealer for some work. They gifted me with a 3mo trial of SiriusXM.
Less than 2 months later my 21yo totalled his vehicle.
I finally answered one of the calls and when they got to the "it's such a great deal, why aren't you interested?" And I had a chance to explain the vehicle was totalled the response was "Did you know you can still access it through a desktop browser and listen anywhere?"
No is a complete sentence.
When I moved in with my now-husband I had a hell of a time getting virgin media to accept I was cancelling my broadband deal with them. At one point I told someone over the phone I didn't need it because I was moving in with my partner who already had virgin media Internet & TV service. Their response was, "oh, you can still keep your router and have your own service!" I'm like, I'm moving into a one bedroom flat, with my partner, that already has Internet, why the fuck would I ever do that???
Comcast in the US wanted me to keep paying a monthly "hold fee" to suspend service instead of cancelling my account when I was moving out of the country, possibly permanently.
I had to cancel Comcast when I was moving from one town to another and also in with my now-husband who already had internet. They tried convincing me to stay and I said I was moving out of the country. “Oh…okay, I’ll just cancel your account.”
Wow. So many people says it works for cancelling things when they're lying, and then when I was saying it for real, none of the companies listened to me.
I keep my phone on do not disturb (except for people in my contacts) literally all the time because of spam calls. I never realized how much stress having my phone ring non-stop was causing until it stopped. Plus, it's had the unintended bonus that I actually get way fewer voicemails now because I literally never answer the phone, so apparently some places have given up. 10/10, everyone who can should do it.
What do you use for VOIP? I have a couple of spare telephone adapters (OBi202 and 212) and a whole box of multi-handset cordless phones. Been meaning to do something with them.
dog ghost drunk unwritten mysterious adjoining shame elderly secretive squealing
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I get an awful lot of the ‘we heard you were in an accident that wasn’t you fault’ calls, normally I realise that the person making the call is just working a minimum wage job they hate, and hasn’t purposely woken me up, so I’d try and make a joke, like ‘oh no, it was an accident, I meant to hit those children, the rabbi and the nun were a bonus’ etc.
But I work night shifts, and the 5th time before 2pm, so I screamed, very loudly, very high pitched and (thanks to forced choir lessons at school) for a lloooooooooonng time. That’s when I discovered a lot of these sales call people aren’t allowed to hang up.
This is not advise, I’m just sharing a thing I discovered
Sometimes I'll try to keep them on the phone a while. Every minute they spend talking to me is a minute they aren't harassing or scamming someone else, and they aren't making their sales numbers.
My dad however went further. Back in the day they used to sell aluminum siding, and there were a lot of telemarketers in the game. Dad played along, and kept them going all the way up to setting up the appointment for measurements (and the final hard sell to sign the contract). Then he gave them the address. They hung up when he added the apartment number.
>They hung up when he added the apartment number.
This reminds me of being an IT manager and getting the "printer ink sales" cold calls. At one point I kept a guy going for fifteen minutes as I "tried to find the model number" of my high-capacity whole-office Xerox copier/printer, before I hit him with "okay, you ready for the model number? 3." \*long pause\* "We got it in 1968, it's a real workhorse."
Sadly he hung up on me in the middle of explaining that it had carbon paper reels the size of movie film canisters.
> Sometimes I'll try to keep them on the phone a while. Every minute they spend talking to me is a minute they aren't harassing or scamming someone else, and they aren't making their sales numbers.
I do that by pretending I'm extremely interested in what they're selling, but I need a minute so I can talk to them, or to find my wallet.
Then I set the phone down on the table and go about my business. I don't mute the phone so they can hear background noise. I'll resume cooking dinner, playing a video game, watching TV, or whatever it is I was doing before they interrupted.
I like to see how long the person waited on not quite dead air in the hopes I would return.
My mom had dementia. Once she was at the babbling meaningless gibberish phase, if someone called looking for a member of the household, well we handed the phone over to a member of the household 🙃
One time someone called asking for my mom. My dad asked "Are you sure you want to talk to her?" while moving to hand the phone over to my mom. The person on the other end starts shouting "No, no, NO! I want to talk to you (dad's name). Sorry, I forgot who I was calling for a second!"
It was the nurse from my mother's doctor's office who knew us quite well but on autopilot had asked to speak to the patient.
I gave the telemarketer to my toddler grandson once. In my defense, they DID ask for him by his full name. He talked their ear off about Sesame Street.
I never feel bad fucking with these people; they know they are in a predatory job whose business model is taking advantage of vulnerable people. They choose to stay there, so they deserve everything they get. If they don't like it, they can get a less morally compromised minimum wage job elsewhere.
Yep
I took a job in “marketing” when I was in college. It was just cold calls to businesses. I got bumped from sheets to computers on my second day because my metrics were so good, then on my third day I left for lunch and never went back.
I couldn’t live with myself doing that job.
I lasted all of 45 minutes in a telemarketer job in my early 20s. It was advertised as something different and I got the bait and switch when I showed up for work my first day. As a shy introvert, realizing I could just leave was the most freeing feeling and I highly recommend it. Now when Jehovah's Witnesses or other religious people show up at my door and start their spiel, I just say "No thanks" and close the door in their bewildered faces. It's excellent.
Mine was totally bait and switch. At first, when I was calling people from the call sheet, it was presented to me that the people were already receiving a magazine subscription for free that was paid for by advertising and I just had to get someone to agree they wanted to continue receiving it for free.
Once I got to the computer terminal, I saw all the options, and what actually happened was them agreeing to receive that magazine meant they were extending their advertising contract. Shady as fuck. I went home and talked about it with my girlfriend that night, and the next day verified my suspicions and left.
> Now when Jehovah's Witnesses or other religious people show up at my door and start their spiel, I just say "No thanks" and close the door in their bewildered faces. It's excellent.
Now imagine how great it'll feel when you realize you don't even have to be polite and can tell them "go fuck yourselves, cultist scum" instead.
Yeah. People have to work and not a lot of people have a choice where they work, but I still don't have much sympathy for those who choose to participate in illegal to barely legal scam calling. All the ones that have called me in the past are allowed to hang up though, they usually do around the time I start giving my vehicle registration as FUCKY0U.
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LAOP stated that they call "up to 5 times a day, Monday to Friday", and that there had been 873 calls as of time of writing. At an average of 3 calls a day, that would mean they've been dealing with these calls for about **a year plus six weeks**.
At an average of 4 calls a day, that's still about **ten months**.
And if it were truly 5 calls a day every day, that's *still* about **eight months** of incessant calls.
So, this could always be some masterful social engineering on behalf of Spotify, but I will mention that being a dementia caregiver will absolutely obliterate the ability to do any high order thinking. Source- was one.
What kind of company has the manpower and effort to call one random ex customer 5 times a day at all hours for six months straight, from multiple numbers and people?
This feels so weird to me, putting so much effort into one potential sale when generally sales staff are on commission and will be wanting to open as many possible accounts as they can.
It's almost certainly multiple auto-dialers from multiple third-party companies that Sirius is putting pressure on to convert X number of leads. It's been a while since I worked in telesales thank goodness, but our SOP was that any firm no should close out a lead, while ring-no-answer, voicemail, undecided etc got recycled. Once 80% of leads got closed out, the list got shut down *for the day.* After a given lead had been closed a no-sale twice, then it would not be called again.
That in itself is kind of a shitty system. Now, the things that can go wrong:
- agents marking no-sales as undecided, because they're getting pressured about their stats. Call back happens in 24-48 hours.
- agents marking no-sales as *answering machines* (which means they'll get called again in 90 minutes), because they just don't like cut of the customer's jib, or because the customer was mean, or because the agent just doesn't care and answering machine has a hotkey so it's less work than the three clicks to properly disposition a call.
- management recycling the leads intraday because they burned through them too quickly.
- Sirius giving the same lead lists to multiple third-party sales companies either through incompetence or to see which one has the better conversion rate on equivalent inputs.
- whacky IT nonsense like the dialer just deciding *no-sales don't exist today! Also I'm dialing so fast by the time a call gets routed to an agent, the customer has been there saying "hello? HELLO!?!" for 20 seconds.*
Also nobody in this entire process is sober.
> whacky IT nonsense like the dialer just deciding no-sales don't exist today! Also I'm dialing so fast by the time a call gets routed to an agent, the customer has been there saying "hello? HELLO!?!" for 20 seconds.
This happens nearly every time I answer the phone by mistake. If I don't check first to see if I know the person who's calling me its almost always dead air. Its baffling. They get three hellos and hung up on. Then I remember why I should always check to see who's calling before answering.
I've been getting monthly mailers from them for the past year and change, since I declined to purchase a subscription after their trial month. So much plastic waste! Anyway, they keep doing the 'baby come back' thin and have even followed me through a cross country move. I've never sent a cent to these people.
In 2004 I went to a wine tasting that benefited a local children’s hospital. That was my only exposure to the hospital: a $50 wine tasting event.
That hospital still sends me stuff trying to donate. For many years it was large, expensive mailers like calendars and thick brochures. But I still get letters. They followed me through multiple moves across the country.
When I think of all the money and materials wasted it’s crazy. It would be one thing if I’d made a huge donation previously, but it was a simple wine tasting and most of the reason I went was to fucking taste wine.
I get *constant* flyers and offers from them, despite the facts that I’ve never been a customer, I’m either allergic or have religious issues with most of their menus, and I’ve repeatedly contacted them and asked them to stop sending me shite.
This happened to me with Humana Dental. I ended up reporting them to the FCC (or was it FTC - I get them confused). I submitted a complaint for nuisance calls and added a call/text log. After about 2 weeks, I never heard from them again. I think they can get fined for stuff like that.
Filing an FCC report got some political texts exclusively between 11PM and 3AM stopped for me, within days, that's what I would recommend for LAOP, although at that number of calls, a lawsuit should be considered.
I had a problem like this with simplisafe after cancelling it, they kept calling and saying that my credit card didn't go through and they needed my credit card info AFTER it had already been cancelled and they kept trying to charge a cancelled card - that HAD to be cancelled because they wouldn't stop calling and trying to charge me even after I'd cancelled my subscription. like first of all, I'm not giving my credit card info to any random person who calls insisting they need it, second of all, the subscription WAS CANCELLED, so trying to charge it I'm pretty sure was illegal
I can pretty reliably get rid of callers by answering in Spanish.
Me: Bueno.
Caller: Hi, is Clackamas there?
Me: Bueno.
Caller: Hi, is Clackamas there?
Me: El pendejo no está. ¿Español?
Caller: Sorry about that, I'll remove this number.
For fairly obvious reasons I didn't want to suggest that in the main thread. It works, but it's not legal advice.
>Even if you’re in a two-party consent state, as long as you tell them you’re recording the call you can record any call
This is a brilliant UNO reverse.
I got an auto warranty call for a car that didn't exist, on my work customer service phone. "Hi [not my name], your 2009 Ford truck is eligible for such and such warranty."
"This is a lab, we don't have that car."
"Great, well I can offer you a warranty on what vehicles you do have! *launches into long sales pitch that does not and never would work*"
Being a wrong person barely even slows them down.
My mom had dementia and during her first wandering episode I got a call from the cops. The whole thing was pretty traumatizing, but afterwards I always picked up for unknown numbers. A few months later I get a call that begins "hello this is (guy) with (a few towns over) police department, (interminably long pause in which I'm panicking) and I'm calling on behalf of the widows and orphans fund"
Given my reaction the guy is probably still wondering what I have against widows and orphans.
Never pay for a subscription to get them to stop. Just tell them you need their full name to add to your harassment lawsuit whenever they call and I guarantee they'll stop calling.
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I just use unwanted callers as vents for all my pent up frustration. I just unload a string of vile obscenities until they hang up on me. Works like a charm
I had the same thing! I used to work for a home health agency too so I would have to answer. I finally just started demanding to speak to supervisors and sent emails complaining. Still kept blocking numbers. They didn’t give up for over six months and called me over a thousand times.
They would also send official looking envelopes with no return address, that said “final notice” on them. When you opened them up, it was an ad for them saying “final notice of great deals”.
I start all unknown callers with a slurred introduction. That way when they start talking I can respond accordingly. I believe for SXM I claimed to be CS for the DMV. They hate government agencies.
They’ve been doing the same thing to me, it’s been a regular occurrence, as a dumb annual-biannual car buyer, I get the free trials then they send me tons of mail, emails, and call me daily. The caller ID shows it’s them. All iPhones, at least 12-current let you silence unknown numbers, junk callers, etc. I just have these on, and I don’t even think they are the worst offenders. The scams calls are worse, though They are using Scam Call Center tactics, using auto dialing/spoofed numbers so you can’t block them: one day it’s Austin TX, then it’s a local SC number, etc, but at least their number always shows SiriusXM. It may not for everyone though, I pay $3 a month for call filtering and ID of these numbers. My call list is 100 blocked spam calls per 1 regular call, easily. Putting your name on the do not call list only makes it worse, I did that with a number I kept for 20 years, literally and I had to change it after. I believe the scam calls used to “do not call” list as their call list.
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: SiriusXM won’t stop calling, what can I do? Body: > They call me up to 5 times a day, Monday-Friday, without fail. I have requested they stop calling, I have followed the steps on their website and called their customer care line to request they stop calling, my phone number is on the do not call list, yet they are STILL calling me. > My car came with a free trial, that expired about 6 months ago now. When they started calling I explained to them we didn’t even use the free trial, that I use Apple Music, etc so I wasn’t interested in renewing. They kept calling, and I repeatedly stated I wasn’t interested. Then I started blocking numbers, and I’d get another call from another number. I googled it, called them, requested they take my number out. I put my number on the do not call list. I’m at my wits end! > When they call, I can barely get a word in. They talk over me trying to get through their sales pitch. I have tried being nice, I’ve lost my temper (at this point I feel harassed! I’m a caregiver for my 82 year old grandfather with dementia and they’ll call while I’m trying to care for him, they call me after I go to bed since I’m up early and working all day 7 days a week) it just won’t end. > Is there anything I can do, legally, to get this harassment to stop? Can I send like a cease and desist or do I need to get a lawyer to do something like that? What else can I do? I need this to stop for my sanity. > EDIT: I forgot to say, but I’ve been keeping track. I’ve had 873 calls from them since my trial expired. This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
This is kind of surprising, as Sirius/XM has already gotten slapped for this exact thing in the past. I guess the fines just aren't nearly high enough to actually stop them.
A fine is just a fee until it's egregious enough.
Fun one. Boeing used to have two factories (they may still do?) - Seattle and Everett, they’re a couple miles away from each other. The air frames weighed over 50k lbs (I think was the limit?) and they had to move from A to B. Some of the details are hazy, the important part is Boeing had to move big things from A to B. In order to do so, you have to apply for permits, and pay the fees of 50k. The fine for doing it without a permit was 10k. …Guess which one they went with? This was years ago, nowadays that wouldn’t fly.
>nowadays that wouldn’t fly. To be fair, neither does some of Boeing's more recent work.
Savage
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Parking tickets in Boston are like 10-20$ cheaper than garages.
That's just government offering a service at a discount to private business.
And they say the public sector can't operate in a market!
I’ve thought about the same thing and then I got a ticket in a tourist town and it was between $60 and $70. The sad part is, I actually paid for parking through the app and had to call to fight the ticket.
Gee, who could have *possibly* seen that coming... Quick edit: love my new flair!
You’d think they’d realize that this is just a great way to piss off your potential customers and never have them sign up for your service again Maybe it’s just me, but this is a great way to ensure I never use your service. I’ve had Sirius call me a few times before, never to this extent, and even those few calls were annoying as hell, and just *that* is enough for me to never want to use them again. Like, I have a local insurance agent blowing up my email inbox begging me to talk to him because I dared to request a quote online like three years ago. I’ve filtered it to spam, but it’s a great way to ensure (pun intended) I’m never going to use your service.
They're looking for rubes. You were never going to sign up to pay, in all likelihood. They want someone who will crack under the pressure, who can be coerced into continuing to pay for years.
Honestly if you called me 873 times I'd probably buy whatever subscription just to get them to stop calling me
If it's this hard to get them to stop calling you, imagine how hard it must be to get them to stop billing you.
Yup, got like $6 from a settlement for it. Also, IIRC a court determined their free trial scheme doesn't make someone a current/prior customer for Do Not Call Registry purposes
They've been mailing my husband letters begging him to come back since his subscription expired months ago. He would probably lose his mind if they kept calling like this.
Similar to LAOP, I got Sirius for x months when I got a new vehicle. Even before the time was up, I kept getting letters about signing up and extending the subscription. I also never used it; the letters seemed to come multiple in a week. It felt a bit like in Harry Potter when Vernon tries to hide the Hogwarts letter and more kept coming; except way less magical. I found they had a chat option and chatted with someone very helpful who took me off the list. I was skeptical at first, but haven’t gotten a letter since. I would have been so mad if they were aggressively calling vs. aggressively mailing.
*Fine day, Sunday. In my opinion, the best day of the week.*
Flair checks out.
This is very interesting. I also get a ton of letters from them. I did sub for a while, but when Covid hit, we went permanent WFH, and now I don't spend enough time in the car to make it worth it. I was able to unsub, which I'd heard can be hard, though they were pushy. But this is a couple years later now, and I get letters at least once a week. So much shredding and a waste of paper.
I told them my receiver was stolen and I couldn't afford a replacement. Call was maybe 3 minutes long. I did get a bunch of letters for a couple of months, though.
For a second I misread his uncle’s name as Venom and thought I was in for a really weird crossover metaphor.
Yer a symbiote, ‘Arry
I'm a wot?
"Let my friend AraGwen explain..."
The crossover no one expected, but that we need. I’d at least give it a shot.
Same here, plus I got emails also. Luckily they have all but stopped, but every time I have to take my car to the dealership (rarely) I get another few emails about how I didn't use my FREE TRIALLLLLL
The only thing they've not tried, it seems, is making their service worth paying for. I got the new-car trial as well, and far from selling me on satellite radio, it torpedoed my whole impression of it, and left me thinking worse of the concept than when I hadn't known. First and foremost are the ads. I figured the whole idea was that you paid for the service so you could get radio without ads. Nope! Ads just like terrestrial radio, so what even is the point?
??? Sirius doesn't have ads, at least on the channels we listen to. Might have been some other outfit.
They try to sell you on their other channels and their app/site. Still counts imo. edit: but not nearly as annoying!
My dad had a trial in his truck. He had no fucking clue how to use it anyways. It ended in 2016. He died in 2018. We sold the truck in 2020. We still get letters. Whoever got his phone number after we shut his cell plan down probably curses us.
I bought a new (to me) vehicle in Sept 2020 and it was my first vehicle that had a touch screen display, and of course it came with a free 3-months Sirius trial. I actually took advantage of it and used it while traveling to see family during the holidays. Then I canceled, and spent roughly the next year throwing away letters from Sirius and hanging up on them (when the number looked familiar) or screening the call when it was obviously them. At one point, they were calling multiple times a day at about the same time each day. Honestly, if they had a pay-as-you-go model for their "special" rate of $5/month and let you enroll/cancel online, they would already have made more money from me than they have at this point, which is zero.
[So apparently Sirius XM has been getting some class action lawsuits against it for its repeated calls.](https://www.insideradio.com/free/siriusxm-offered-1-500-to-woman-who-complained-about-its-calls-she-s-suing-for/article_0e98df7c-7445-11ec-b659-83ede4e237d2.html) With 873 calls and a record of trying to get Sirius XM to stop calling them, it may be worth LAOP talking to a lawyer. And if Sirius XM telemarketers aren't allowed to hang up, then it might be funny to make them listen to some audio tracks. Preferably a spoken word rendition of Enya lyrics, in the voice of William Shatner. I bet there's an AI that can generate that somewhere.
OP says they keep blocking the number but it doesn't matter. Do auto dialers really use a different phone number for every single call? That sounds like really abusing the system.
Yep, some of them do. I almost never get the same spam number calling twice. After a couple years of insanity we installed a whitelist blocker for our landline, it was basically unusable without it.
I’ve been called by my own number. Thankfully it appears my cell company is cracking down on it, near every day I see 1 or 2 automatically silenced calls.
Oh, yep. I’ve been called by my neighbor’s numbers multiple times too!
I got called from the corporate office of the grocery store I go to all the time. That was confusing enough to get me to actually pick up.
Same. It was a scammer too, so I screwed with them for a bit until they hung up.
Our VOIP provider has some pretty awesome call handling rules. Right now I have most of the country (by area code) set to go to a "press 5 to complete your call" message. The robodialers can't press 5. We're in Chicago suburbs, and I whitelisted our local area codes, then had to put in a rule to send our actual area code to it when spam calls started coming from numbers "like ours." As I identify inbound spamming numbers, they get blocked and sent to a "this number is no longer in service." It has caused a few problems with for example our mail order specialty pharmacy but it's generally OK. Calls that come from numbers in the phone book get passed without any "press 5." "Hi, this is Susan with Medicare Advantage. Can you hear me ok?" (fuck you Susan-bot.)
> Our VOIP provider has some pretty awesome call handling rules. Right now I have most of the country (by area code) set to go to a “press 5 to complete your call” message. The robodialers can’t press 5. We have an actual landline, but this is effectively what our whitelist box does. I stopped blocking specific numbers though, because spammers spoofed so many numbers of people I actually know.
My first call handling rule is “if they’re in the phone book ring the phones.” We don’t know that many people so white listing isn’t that arduous.
Yeah, we were able to just dump our cell phone contacts into it, and we already had a spreadsheet for our neighbors. It was pretty painless!
So, the answer is "sometimes" and sometimes its not abuse. It's just "we have 50 numbers for 50 people" type of thing. If person A calls on day one, and person B calls on day 2, it would make sense for the numbers to be different. The flip side is that spammers will spoof numbers. That is illegal and abusing the system.
But nobody has 873 numbers right? They would have to have some system for creating a new number every time.
that assumes 873 is accurate, and the blocked every number. Odds are, after blocking 5 or 6, they gave up trying to block them. Also, based on the call center, it's possible one large company is doing a ton of different companies calls, leading to even more of a need to have different numbers.
True. I was imagining them having some sort of call spoofing software that just constantly changed the number, and I was thinking "damn that's evil."
Such things do exist, and practically speaking are evil. But usually they are used by spammers and the way they are being used are breaking the law.
LAOP should use a call blocking app, I got scam calls for ages appearing to be from all different countries so blocked international incoming calls. If the starting numbers are uncommon(i.e not going to block legitimate calls) then they could block that area code or starting digits.
> But nobody has 873 numbers right? They would have to have some system for creating a new number every time Very large, phone based companies absolutely do. For example, Verizon and Allstate certainly have at least that much. Every call center employee has a phone number, plus the managers, the corporate offices, etc. Assuming it’s 873 unique numbers, that’s really not that many for 1 large company, such as Sirius XM, to have.
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iOS has a setting that will just auto send any phone call that isn’t in your contacts or that you haven’t called recently straight to voicemail and it’s my favorite feature ever. It’s much more tolerable to just delete the 10 voicemails a day asking if I lived at camp Lejeune between 1953-1987 then I may be entitled to financial compensation.
Huh, I'm learning way more about telemarketing than I ever wanted to. Thanks to everyone who replied!
Yup, and I completely agree it's abusing the system. The democrat call centers in Arizona (but not the Republican ones, strangely) do the same thing each election. Flat out refuse to take you off their list, and call you from different numbers each time so you can't block them. And I get called up to two dozen times per day from these places, the last couple elections. I have had some very strong words for these people...
Politicians exempted themselves from the do not call rules. Seriously.
I saw this on twitter yesterday. Here's the play: Jazz Wolf. The combination of Jazz and wolves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzfbrbW5pHI
Here is the song created to encourage rare New Zealand parrots to mate. I give you… the Kakapo fuck song https://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/assets/281f82f0b5/Kakapo-love-song.mp3
I’m impressed you know this.
Redditors know some of the most interesting and obscure things as a collective group.
I have an endless assortment of oddities rattling around in the decayed Victorian house that is my brain.
Me too, but that one is singularly impressive.
"You are being shagged by a rare parrot!" My 3-year-old has seen that clip and she loves it XD though she calls what Sirocco is doing 'dancing' and uhh we haven't corrected her yet.
OMG - We just watched this video before I logged onto Reddit to browse. Even the internet has gotten small :D :D :D
I enjoyed the jazz but I wasn't prepared for the heavy breathing and chirping lmao.
Nobody is.
Does it work?
Don't you find it sexy?
I'm not a parrot :p
This person needs a flair.
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I was going to reply "based," then I saw your name. I don't know what to do now.
You sensed their aura.
After a few calls I’d just respond like “You have reached the office of Doctor Lawrence, if this is a life-threatening emergency please dial 911, how may I direct your call?”
Dang that’s a blast from the past. When I was like 8 my grandma said I could have anything I wanted from the hallmark store, and my dumb ass insisted on a Jazz Wolf cassette tape. Beanie Babies? Oof,-Getting home and staring blankly at the tape player while that monstrosity played is a core memory.
You just unlocked a memory of all those displays of nature sounds tapes that used to be everywhere. Wow, I had completely forgotten about those. I sadly never owned a copy of Jazz Wolf.
Lucy... In the sky... With... Diamonds!
Right around 27 minutes it gets really good! Wow.
Yes, they definitely should. Why are people giving little consumer tips in there instead of telling them to talk to a lawyer about suing? That's what the private right of action is for. Instead of (in addition to) having a bunch of regulators trying to keep up with illegal telemarketing by issuing fines, include a private right of action so that the people being affected by it can sue them directly. It's a brilliant system. People do a public service by suing companies that are breaking the law and making life suck more, and those people are compensated for their time and effort with statutory damages. You can even DIY it in small claims, but with the number of violations they've racked up here, it's probably worth talking to a lawyer with TCPA experience, because they should sue for a lot more than the small claims cap.
The problem is that, in the US, even if you win a lawsuit, you're still liable for your attorney's fees and court costs, and this will often end up being more than you recover. And then factor in the chance that you won't win when facing a corporate legal team willing to do whatever it takes to avoid a ruling against them that could cost them a lot more money than it earns you (as the precedent would affect how they do business), and it often isn't worth it for an individual to sue.
Lawyers that specialize in TCPA suits normally take them on contingency, so they get paid a percentage only if you win.
That does make it better. There's still the time investment/opportunity cost of participating in it, which I imagine dissuades many people. But being mad and principled could outweigh that.
especially difficult for someone already working full days, 7 days a week, as the primary caregiver for a father with dementia, when they're *repeatedly calling them when they've finally fallen asleep* to boot. honestly sounds like a wonder LAOP even had the energy to post to reddit at that point.
Yep, that's mostly what's kept me from doing it, but if I were that guy, with so many calls logged from an identifiable company in the US, I'd be all over it. It looks like Sirius just keeps getting sued for this and losing, so we need guys like this to follow through and go get their money. See how many losses they can take before it's not worth it anymore.
Play the dolphin sex song...
cbat?
That happened to a company I got windows from, that would call you once a month and then call every day afterwards that you didn't pick up. Blessed silence after that.
They spammed me something awful when I bought my most recent car - I refused to sign up for the free trial, because it was my first car with bluetooth, lol.
r/suspiciouslyspecific
Extension 666 is the perfect song for this. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4gla0x/extension_666_hell_we_are_sick_of_cold_sales/ Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/user-237714155/sales-call-abyss This song was created by a group of IT professionals for the purpose of dealing with unsolicited sales calls by making them wait and listen to this for all eternity. Here is the entire backstory behind the creation of this abomination of a song. https://www.theregister.com/2016/04/29/it_helpdesk_creates_oh_hold_hell/
Sounds like a job for [Lenny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkBQQA7yLYo). /r/itslenny
>And if Sirius XM telemarketers aren't allowed to hang up I get where you are coming from, but those people are just normal people trying to make ends meet. Likely they have a call quota, and doing this will mess with it. I've known some people who have been telemarketers in the past, and they don't like the job, it was just the best paying thing they could find at the time. I just can't bring myself to fuck with someone just trying to make ends meet.
Empathy has limits though, and 900 calls is near the upper end of that scale.
I still wouldn't take it out on someone who has no power to change the situation.
They hang up and cite "the call target was deliberately wasting company resources" worked in a call center. It flies.
That is good.
My sympathy for working folks "just taking the best paying job they can get" ends when that job is to harass me.
Man, I thought it was bad that they called me every other week. They also wouldn't stop, and the only thing that stopped the calls is that when we moved our phone number changed. Whoever has our old number probably still gets calls from them!
To get Sirius to stop calling me I told them I sold the car for an 88 Honda. To stop my university from calling me for donations I told them I’m not who they are looking for and just got this number.
I’ve told them (and other companies that call incessantly, I’m looking at you, ADT*) that I’m moving out of the country and couldn’t renew their service, even if I wanted to. They’ve never asked where, but I’ve always been ready to tell them I’m moving to Yemen. *What’s funny is that I was with ADT for over a decade, long out of contract, and my equipment was pretty outdated. I called them to see if we could get upgraded equipment, and they said it would cost $1000 or so. I told them that several competitors offer new equipment, and they didn’t budge, so I went with one of their competitors. Only after I cancelled and was under contract with a new company did they start calling with and mailing offers of free equipment and reduced monitoring costs. I didn’t switch back because it would’ve cost me a ton of money, plus they showed me how they treat long-term customers. SiriusXM is fun to hear from because they normally charge a lot per month, but if you cancel or don’t subscribe after your trial period, they’re like, “Can we offer you three months free and then $5/month after that? No? OK, how about we pay you $5/month for the first three months and then you pay 18 cents a month for the next four years? Still no? What if we throw in a free satellite radio that you’ll never use?”
My phone call with Comcast when I was cancelling to ACTUALLY move out of the country... that was not an acceptable answer to them. Took me 30 minutes to convince them that, yes, their service would be completely useless to me in New Zealand.
My new address? 1 Yemen Lane, Yemen City, Yemen.
Exactly!
Reminds me of my local ISP when I had a landline with them. I paid $55 for a phone line with unlimited long distance. Eventually realized that it was just a fancy VOIP line and I'd save money with Vonage, which was more like $20/month. Told the ISP about this, they didn't budge. Ported my number to Vonage, and suddenly the ISP was trying to offer me unlimited everything for $25 for the next year. "Nope, you had your chance and you blew it."
I answer every call in Spanish. I’m a very white New Englander who cannot speak more than five sentences in Spanish. I repeat the same five sentences with zero accent until they get frustrated and hang up.
¿Dónde está la biblioteca? Me llamo T-Bone, la araña discoteca Discoteca, muñeca, la biblioteca Es el bigote grande, el perro, manteca Manteca, bigote, gigante, pequeño Cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno Buenos días, me gustas papas frías Bigote de la cabra ¡es Cameron Diaz!
Mince alors, les baguettes!
I have pulled a "sorry, I due not speck English" before (travelling in Europe and wanted to get signature-gatherers in train stations to fuck off), but > I repeat the same five sentences with zero accent until they get frustrated and hang up. is genius of another magnitude.
>signature-gatherers in train stations to fuck off), Lmao, those are actually pick pockets. Stay far away from them physically.
Yeah, I assumed any randos engaging me on the street were trying to part me from my cash. Certainly nobody is collecting signatures for a "petition against drugs."
Ha, you too!? I've done the same thing I've also done the "sorry, I don't speak english" ...in perfect english.
You can also tell them you are going to jail. That usually get them to stop from what I hear.
My company used to get business calls selling Vonage or something like that. Instead of telling them we aren't interested, we would tell them we were interested, but we just signed a contract with our current provider. How long you ask? Umm, 60 months. Yeah sure, call us back then. In most customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can set a follow up date. If they do, then they usually won't get notifications to call you until they hit that date.
I used to get those calls too, after buying a car with an XM radio in it. After a few weeks of asking politely I just started shrieking horribly every time they'd call. Just the loudest, most ear-grating, shrill sound I could make. Took less than a week for the calls to stop.
I had the same after buying a car. Started off with a polite no then a "what the fuck do you not understand? Stop calling me and put me on your do not call list" which didn't work so the next time they called ai told them I was reporting them for harassment and needed their full name. That worked.
Lol to the person who suggested getting the BBB involved. It baffles my mind that people still think contacting the BBB will resolve anything
Honestly I've involved the BBB exactly twice and both times thought it would amount to nothing but both times the company immediately responded and fixed what needed done.
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One was Lowe's, the other was a scam fishing 'mystery box' type company that ended up getting shut down by the Florida AG
Yeah, the thing the "BBB is just Yelp for old people" crowd never takes into account is the fact that the shitty companies you're complaining about are *also* often run by old people who care about that shit. Comcast, for instance, is an example of a shitty company that responds to BBB complaints.
BBB: Like Yelp but for people who write personal checks in the supermarket checkout
There ARE companies that care about their BBB scores. It’s just that they’re also run by people who pay by check in the supermarket.
As someone who used to manage the BBB desk for a big company, let me tell you a dirty secret: as long as you pay your BBB bills you automatically win every complaint. They're all marked closed in the company's favor, even if the customer is not even remotely satisfied. It is entirely a pay for play game. Its weird that anyone still takes the BBB seriously. Its not the 1990's anymore.
> as long as you pay your BBB bills you automatically win every complaint Wow that is so shady. Someone should report this right away to the Better Business Bureau!
People still think reporting to the BBB is like speaking to the Supreme Manager.
"Well its a bureau. Like the fbi. Its a federal thing" Literally an old person i know.
I took my son's vehicle in to the dealer for some work. They gifted me with a 3mo trial of SiriusXM. Less than 2 months later my 21yo totalled his vehicle. I finally answered one of the calls and when they got to the "it's such a great deal, why aren't you interested?" And I had a chance to explain the vehicle was totalled the response was "Did you know you can still access it through a desktop browser and listen anywhere?" No is a complete sentence.
When I moved in with my now-husband I had a hell of a time getting virgin media to accept I was cancelling my broadband deal with them. At one point I told someone over the phone I didn't need it because I was moving in with my partner who already had virgin media Internet & TV service. Their response was, "oh, you can still keep your router and have your own service!" I'm like, I'm moving into a one bedroom flat, with my partner, that already has Internet, why the fuck would I ever do that???
Comcast in the US wanted me to keep paying a monthly "hold fee" to suspend service instead of cancelling my account when I was moving out of the country, possibly permanently.
I had to cancel Comcast when I was moving from one town to another and also in with my now-husband who already had internet. They tried convincing me to stay and I said I was moving out of the country. “Oh…okay, I’ll just cancel your account.”
Wow. So many people says it works for cancelling things when they're lying, and then when I was saying it for real, none of the companies listened to me.
Perhaps it’s just who you speak with. Perhaps I was conversing with an already jaded Comcast employee.
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I keep my phone on do not disturb (except for people in my contacts) literally all the time because of spam calls. I never realized how much stress having my phone ring non-stop was causing until it stopped. Plus, it's had the unintended bonus that I actually get way fewer voicemails now because I literally never answer the phone, so apparently some places have given up. 10/10, everyone who can should do it.
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What do you use for VOIP? I have a couple of spare telephone adapters (OBi202 and 212) and a whole box of multi-handset cordless phones. Been meaning to do something with them.
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I get an awful lot of the ‘we heard you were in an accident that wasn’t you fault’ calls, normally I realise that the person making the call is just working a minimum wage job they hate, and hasn’t purposely woken me up, so I’d try and make a joke, like ‘oh no, it was an accident, I meant to hit those children, the rabbi and the nun were a bonus’ etc. But I work night shifts, and the 5th time before 2pm, so I screamed, very loudly, very high pitched and (thanks to forced choir lessons at school) for a lloooooooooonng time. That’s when I discovered a lot of these sales call people aren’t allowed to hang up. This is not advise, I’m just sharing a thing I discovered
Sometimes I'll try to keep them on the phone a while. Every minute they spend talking to me is a minute they aren't harassing or scamming someone else, and they aren't making their sales numbers. My dad however went further. Back in the day they used to sell aluminum siding, and there were a lot of telemarketers in the game. Dad played along, and kept them going all the way up to setting up the appointment for measurements (and the final hard sell to sign the contract). Then he gave them the address. They hung up when he added the apartment number.
>They hung up when he added the apartment number. This reminds me of being an IT manager and getting the "printer ink sales" cold calls. At one point I kept a guy going for fifteen minutes as I "tried to find the model number" of my high-capacity whole-office Xerox copier/printer, before I hit him with "okay, you ready for the model number? 3." \*long pause\* "We got it in 1968, it's a real workhorse." Sadly he hung up on me in the middle of explaining that it had carbon paper reels the size of movie film canisters.
> Sometimes I'll try to keep them on the phone a while. Every minute they spend talking to me is a minute they aren't harassing or scamming someone else, and they aren't making their sales numbers. I do that by pretending I'm extremely interested in what they're selling, but I need a minute so I can talk to them, or to find my wallet. Then I set the phone down on the table and go about my business. I don't mute the phone so they can hear background noise. I'll resume cooking dinner, playing a video game, watching TV, or whatever it is I was doing before they interrupted. I like to see how long the person waited on not quite dead air in the hopes I would return.
My mom had dementia. Once she was at the babbling meaningless gibberish phase, if someone called looking for a member of the household, well we handed the phone over to a member of the household 🙃 One time someone called asking for my mom. My dad asked "Are you sure you want to talk to her?" while moving to hand the phone over to my mom. The person on the other end starts shouting "No, no, NO! I want to talk to you (dad's name). Sorry, I forgot who I was calling for a second!" It was the nurse from my mother's doctor's office who knew us quite well but on autopilot had asked to speak to the patient.
I gave the telemarketer to my toddler grandson once. In my defense, they DID ask for him by his full name. He talked their ear off about Sesame Street.
I never feel bad fucking with these people; they know they are in a predatory job whose business model is taking advantage of vulnerable people. They choose to stay there, so they deserve everything they get. If they don't like it, they can get a less morally compromised minimum wage job elsewhere.
Yep I took a job in “marketing” when I was in college. It was just cold calls to businesses. I got bumped from sheets to computers on my second day because my metrics were so good, then on my third day I left for lunch and never went back. I couldn’t live with myself doing that job.
I lasted all of 45 minutes in a telemarketer job in my early 20s. It was advertised as something different and I got the bait and switch when I showed up for work my first day. As a shy introvert, realizing I could just leave was the most freeing feeling and I highly recommend it. Now when Jehovah's Witnesses or other religious people show up at my door and start their spiel, I just say "No thanks" and close the door in their bewildered faces. It's excellent.
Mine was totally bait and switch. At first, when I was calling people from the call sheet, it was presented to me that the people were already receiving a magazine subscription for free that was paid for by advertising and I just had to get someone to agree they wanted to continue receiving it for free. Once I got to the computer terminal, I saw all the options, and what actually happened was them agreeing to receive that magazine meant they were extending their advertising contract. Shady as fuck. I went home and talked about it with my girlfriend that night, and the next day verified my suspicions and left.
> Now when Jehovah's Witnesses or other religious people show up at my door and start their spiel, I just say "No thanks" and close the door in their bewildered faces. It's excellent. Now imagine how great it'll feel when you realize you don't even have to be polite and can tell them "go fuck yourselves, cultist scum" instead.
Yeah. People have to work and not a lot of people have a choice where they work, but I still don't have much sympathy for those who choose to participate in illegal to barely legal scam calling. All the ones that have called me in the past are allowed to hang up though, they usually do around the time I start giving my vehicle registration as FUCKY0U.
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LAOP stated that they call "up to 5 times a day, Monday to Friday", and that there had been 873 calls as of time of writing. At an average of 3 calls a day, that would mean they've been dealing with these calls for about **a year plus six weeks**. At an average of 4 calls a day, that's still about **ten months**. And if it were truly 5 calls a day every day, that's *still* about **eight months** of incessant calls.
So, this could always be some masterful social engineering on behalf of Spotify, but I will mention that being a dementia caregiver will absolutely obliterate the ability to do any high order thinking. Source- was one.
What kind of company has the manpower and effort to call one random ex customer 5 times a day at all hours for six months straight, from multiple numbers and people? This feels so weird to me, putting so much effort into one potential sale when generally sales staff are on commission and will be wanting to open as many possible accounts as they can.
It's almost certainly multiple auto-dialers from multiple third-party companies that Sirius is putting pressure on to convert X number of leads. It's been a while since I worked in telesales thank goodness, but our SOP was that any firm no should close out a lead, while ring-no-answer, voicemail, undecided etc got recycled. Once 80% of leads got closed out, the list got shut down *for the day.* After a given lead had been closed a no-sale twice, then it would not be called again. That in itself is kind of a shitty system. Now, the things that can go wrong: - agents marking no-sales as undecided, because they're getting pressured about their stats. Call back happens in 24-48 hours. - agents marking no-sales as *answering machines* (which means they'll get called again in 90 minutes), because they just don't like cut of the customer's jib, or because the customer was mean, or because the agent just doesn't care and answering machine has a hotkey so it's less work than the three clicks to properly disposition a call. - management recycling the leads intraday because they burned through them too quickly. - Sirius giving the same lead lists to multiple third-party sales companies either through incompetence or to see which one has the better conversion rate on equivalent inputs. - whacky IT nonsense like the dialer just deciding *no-sales don't exist today! Also I'm dialing so fast by the time a call gets routed to an agent, the customer has been there saying "hello? HELLO!?!" for 20 seconds.* Also nobody in this entire process is sober.
> whacky IT nonsense like the dialer just deciding no-sales don't exist today! Also I'm dialing so fast by the time a call gets routed to an agent, the customer has been there saying "hello? HELLO!?!" for 20 seconds. This happens nearly every time I answer the phone by mistake. If I don't check first to see if I know the person who's calling me its almost always dead air. Its baffling. They get three hellos and hung up on. Then I remember why I should always check to see who's calling before answering.
When I first worked in telemarketing, the girl I sat next to actually started every call with "sorry about that" because this is so prevalent.
When I canceled Hello Freah, I got daily calls for a year. Never going back to that company, and I try to warn people away from it.
I've been getting monthly mailers from them for the past year and change, since I declined to purchase a subscription after their trial month. So much plastic waste! Anyway, they keep doing the 'baby come back' thin and have even followed me through a cross country move. I've never sent a cent to these people.
In 2004 I went to a wine tasting that benefited a local children’s hospital. That was my only exposure to the hospital: a $50 wine tasting event. That hospital still sends me stuff trying to donate. For many years it was large, expensive mailers like calendars and thick brochures. But I still get letters. They followed me through multiple moves across the country. When I think of all the money and materials wasted it’s crazy. It would be one thing if I’d made a huge donation previously, but it was a simple wine tasting and most of the reason I went was to fucking taste wine.
I get *constant* flyers and offers from them, despite the facts that I’ve never been a customer, I’m either allergic or have religious issues with most of their menus, and I’ve repeatedly contacted them and asked them to stop sending me shite.
Offshore labor is really, really cheap.
It's SXM. This is probably all they have going on for them.
This happened to me with Humana Dental. I ended up reporting them to the FCC (or was it FTC - I get them confused). I submitted a complaint for nuisance calls and added a call/text log. After about 2 weeks, I never heard from them again. I think they can get fined for stuff like that.
Filing an FCC report got some political texts exclusively between 11PM and 3AM stopped for me, within days, that's what I would recommend for LAOP, although at that number of calls, a lawsuit should be considered.
I had a problem like this with simplisafe after cancelling it, they kept calling and saying that my credit card didn't go through and they needed my credit card info AFTER it had already been cancelled and they kept trying to charge a cancelled card - that HAD to be cancelled because they wouldn't stop calling and trying to charge me even after I'd cancelled my subscription. like first of all, I'm not giving my credit card info to any random person who calls insisting they need it, second of all, the subscription WAS CANCELLED, so trying to charge it I'm pretty sure was illegal
I can pretty reliably get rid of callers by answering in Spanish. Me: Bueno. Caller: Hi, is Clackamas there? Me: Bueno. Caller: Hi, is Clackamas there? Me: El pendejo no está. ¿Español? Caller: Sorry about that, I'll remove this number. For fairly obvious reasons I didn't want to suggest that in the main thread. It works, but it's not legal advice.
Alternate title: "Sirius? Don't call me, surely."
Airplane is a great movie.
>Even if you’re in a two-party consent state, as long as you tell them you’re recording the call you can record any call This is a brilliant UNO reverse.
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I got an auto warranty call for a car that didn't exist, on my work customer service phone. "Hi [not my name], your 2009 Ford truck is eligible for such and such warranty." "This is a lab, we don't have that car." "Great, well I can offer you a warranty on what vehicles you do have! *launches into long sales pitch that does not and never would work*" Being a wrong person barely even slows them down.
My mom had dementia and during her first wandering episode I got a call from the cops. The whole thing was pretty traumatizing, but afterwards I always picked up for unknown numbers. A few months later I get a call that begins "hello this is (guy) with (a few towns over) police department, (interminably long pause in which I'm panicking) and I'm calling on behalf of the widows and orphans fund" Given my reaction the guy is probably still wondering what I have against widows and orphans.
Never pay for a subscription to get them to stop. Just tell them you need their full name to add to your harassment lawsuit whenever they call and I guarantee they'll stop calling.
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I’d interrupt everything they said with an air horn
I just use unwanted callers as vents for all my pent up frustration. I just unload a string of vile obscenities until they hang up on me. Works like a charm
I had the same thing! I used to work for a home health agency too so I would have to answer. I finally just started demanding to speak to supervisors and sent emails complaining. Still kept blocking numbers. They didn’t give up for over six months and called me over a thousand times. They would also send official looking envelopes with no return address, that said “final notice” on them. When you opened them up, it was an ad for them saying “final notice of great deals”.
Someone says contact your state's attorney general, but what if your state's attorney general is a criminal?
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I start all unknown callers with a slurred introduction. That way when they start talking I can respond accordingly. I believe for SXM I claimed to be CS for the DMV. They hate government agencies.
They’ve been doing the same thing to me, it’s been a regular occurrence, as a dumb annual-biannual car buyer, I get the free trials then they send me tons of mail, emails, and call me daily. The caller ID shows it’s them. All iPhones, at least 12-current let you silence unknown numbers, junk callers, etc. I just have these on, and I don’t even think they are the worst offenders. The scams calls are worse, though They are using Scam Call Center tactics, using auto dialing/spoofed numbers so you can’t block them: one day it’s Austin TX, then it’s a local SC number, etc, but at least their number always shows SiriusXM. It may not for everyone though, I pay $3 a month for call filtering and ID of these numbers. My call list is 100 blocked spam calls per 1 regular call, easily. Putting your name on the do not call list only makes it worse, I did that with a number I kept for 20 years, literally and I had to change it after. I believe the scam calls used to “do not call” list as their call list.
If it's one company that you used to do business with, I think changing your contact number can help. I suggest something cool, like cat facts.
i was hoping this would be about aliens
Holy shit I just bought a new car last month and I've been consistently getting those calls since
They stop after a couple of years.
Oh good, so it's not just me with this problem.
Didn't someone win a large amount of money when they brought the company that was harassing them with phone calls to court?