As a business owner or entrepreneur, the last thing you need during your busy day is to be interrupted by scam artists who work via telephone. They often don’t call in using 800 (or private) numbers, so it can sometimes be hard to tell whether picking up the phone will lead to a potential business opportunity or not.
I’m not talking about legitimate telemarketing situations where someone has sent you a brochure or a document, or is just basically following up on a prior conversation with you. What I am talking about are those endless 24/7 calls from the same number over and over again and that make you want to pull your own teeth because that would be less painful!
During those times when I was unable to answer immediately and later tried to call them back, I would either receive an “unsubscribe” voice mail with instructions on how to remove myself from their list (as if that was going to happen) or a live person at the other end either apologizing or just abruptly hanging up.
On a lark, I decided to Google some of these phone numbers that had been harassing me to no end (just by typing the phone number into the Google search box) and was surprised to discover how many others had been endlessly annoyed by these same sources.
In fact, there are several really neat websites set up to vent about these very issues and hopefully further the grassroots movement to disallow this type of telephone harassment:
These folks seem to be dedicated to supporting the “Do-Not-Call” regulation, a regulation which has been introduced in many parts of North America, yet still doesn’t seem to be having much of a practical impact. I believe the focus of Caller Complaints is on building a worldwide database of telemarketers based on the input of everyday folks like you and me.
This is another one of my favorite sites due to its simplicity and one’s ability to type in a phone number and gain immediate feedback from others who have also had encounters of the worst kind with that same phone number.
This is another online community fighting back to expose the offenders publicly.
There is certainly no guarantee that if you provide personal feedback to any one of these sites (or similar ones) that you will be spared the annoyance and waste of time from these calls in the future. But it certainly can help to spread the word and hopefully squelch the efforts of the nasty telephone spammers and scammers who are attempting to ride on the coattails of the legitimate telemarketing industry.
Plus, it just plain feels good to rebel against unwanted phone spam from time to time. Don’t you think?
