It's Happening Again - Solicitations
 

A reminder for some. Here in the Lakes Region.
Have a talk with the seniors in your family. Or talk to yourself if you are a senior.

Received a telephone solicitation.
This time for military veterans.
Help out the veterans.
Who can be against that?

Except the company doing the solicitations keeps 85% of all donations as overhead/profit and only 15% actually goes to veterans.

The same holds true for policemen/women, firefighters, etc.

Agreed songkrai, that sadly seems to be the trend with a lot of nonprofit/charities these days. I wont donate to anything with out looking into the organization first. You may think you're helping the vets, fire, police, cancer patients etc but you may just be paying a nice hefty salary.

Yup, I donated to what I thought was my local police and found out later it was a collecting service using their name. All legit but they got a big chunk of the money for the service. Soon after I started getting calls from all kinds of police organizations and the like. Never again.

Don't answer the phone if you don't recognize the caller. If you don't have caller ID read out then get it.

The call/solicitation today was quite slick.

It was a "live" person except it was a recording.

Each time I asked if the caller was a real person, a recording came back stating "yes, I'm a real person".

Quite slick.
These solicitation companies apparently are even more greedy. Not hiring a live person to pay a salary/commission on each donation.
Now using voice recognition software to mimic a real person.

The robo calls are very annoying. I never answer my landline anymore unless I know who is calling. The caller ID that pops up on my tv through Comcast is pretty sweet though. Actually, the only reason I have one at all is cuz my cell service is spotty.

If you suspect the caller is a robot/recording, ask them what their favorite kind of tomato sauce / pizza / ice cream is. The robot will say "I don't know" or "I can't answer that" and continue their pitch. That's the point at which you hang up.

If you want to donate to a cause, do it on their web site so you know 100% goes to the organization. Unfortunately that still doesn't ensure the money is spent on the cause; many charities spend >50% on "administration".

So.................This only happens to seniors? ALL seniors need to be protected from themselves?

It is really absurd. We pay dearly for our phone equipment and service and we dare not use it for fear of fraud and abuse. When will the manufacturers and service providers come to our aid. We are being ripped off by them.

Like you, we have poor cell service, otherwise we would drop the land line in the blink of an eye.

Ever look into a voip type system? Run the house phones off your internet? No experience there my self but I've seen some people do it with happy results.

IRS Call
 

We got a threatening call from the IRS, who never call, today. It was not answered but was put on voice mail.

irs
 

the irs will never call you before they send you a letter and you have responded to them

IRS Calls
 

Around tax time I received several bogus calls from the IRS - once I received the same call twice in one day. The most memorable one was from Officer Ding-a-ling (can’t remember what he called himself), who said he was calling from the criminal division of the IRS in Washington, DC. If I didn’t respond, he would be coming to pick me up and put me behind de bars. His parting words were, "God May Bless You.” It has been several months and I am still anxiously awaiting his arrival at my door. It is unbelievable that anyone could be taken in by such a call - more humorous than credible. I am still laughing.

Where did Songkrai write "only seniors" or "ALL seniors"? I saw "Have a talk with the seniors in your family" which doesn't exclude any other groups or imply all seniors are susceptible.

The IRS Scam...
 

....The IRS scam gets people all worked up, but it is totally a scam. The caller, which is sometimes live or a recording, states that you are being sued by the IRS and to avoid the lawsuit, you need to pay what you owe now!

It is total BS and shameful, really, because a lot of folks fall for it.

By the (un) luck of the draw, we have been audited twice by the IRS over the years, and they do not call you on the phone. The IRS communicates in writing to the taxpayer if there is a legitimate issue they are looking at so there is a paper audit trail.

If you get the IRS lawsuit call, just hang up!

Got that call on my recorder at home and knew it was a scam.....I returned the call and as soon as I got a person on the line (very heavy accent) I let go with a marine air horn...put it right against the receiver,all 120 db of it.
My daughter was cracking up.
So much fun....I called back and got another person.
But everything is fine...I've been left a small fortune by a Nigerian prince and that money will be coming as soon as I cover a few expenses

Received a call once from an actual person soliciting for the local police. Knew it was a professional fund raiser because he said "I see you donated $100 last year so would you do the same this year."
I told him I hadn't donated the previous year and hung up the phone.
The police used to call themselves until someone convinced them this was better and more efficient.

I got the IRS calls twice last year. I threatened the guy (& his family's) life hoping he would be dumb enough to call the cop's. He didn't bite.

I am told it's not hard to fake (spoof) a caller ID, so even that wouldn't be for sure.

It helps avoid unpleasant relatives, though. :)

Add all this up to another failed government program called "DO NOT CALL" list. Another DC waste of time and money. Just continues to prove that Washington cannot do much correctly, when they cannot even handle unwanted calls. Have you heard about how many of these folks get prosecuted? Answer....few. We allegedly cannot find them. Sure gives you a lot of confidence in our intelligence capabilities when we cannot find people making these robo calls. If there is no name on caller ID that I recognize, we never answer the phone.

Zapper
 

Several years ago I had a call zapper that I got at Radio Shack for about $10.00. As I recall, it detected computer generated calls and sent back a signal telling the computer this was not a "live" line. We never even knew there was an incoming call. We stopped using it after a while when the computers stopped calling, because it also blocked incoming FAX. Now that nobody uses FAX anymore, maybe I'll look for a replacement.

Any current experience out there?