The same company has been harassing for the better part a year now wanting to buy a property I don’t own. I have filled a DO NOT CALL registration, I have blocked their numbers multiple times, I have told them to stop calling and to remove my name from their list, and now I’m getting maybe 1 or 2 calls a day and multiple texts.
You don’t own the property, so tell them you’re willing to sell, go through whatever process they give you, wasting as much of their time as you are willing to, then inform them that they’ll have to talk to the owner to finalize the deal.
this is the way. i had to break it to my friend recently, these scam callers don’t have a DO NOT CALL list. they just have a list where they call you more.
i got my cell number decades ago. for many years i would get calls for a Sabrina. i explained to them many times over the years, i don’t know anyone by that name and i’m not interested. every time, they’d wait about 6 months and the calls would start up again. about a year or two ago i was in the shop working, and got a call. i decided after that moment that i was Sabrina and i was interested in whatever it was they were selling.
a few days later, i got a call, told them i was Sabrina, was down for whatever services they had. i managed to get the person to give me the address they had listed, under the guise of confirming it. before the end of the week i had 3 different roofing contractors scheduled, all to show up at the same time, same day.
my only regret was that i couldn’t be there to watch the drama unfold. when they called back later i told them i had no idea what they were talking about.
in the year and a half since that incident, i have received no more calls for Sabrina.
moral of the story, sometime the best answer isn’t the honest one.
I’ve been known to text them back some very very NSFW images. That tends to put a stop to it (until the next batch of wannabe flippers gets that number).
I sent one a sex hotline number and actually tricked the guy on the other end. Still didn’t stop them.
It probably helps that I have a couple of things in my favor.
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The phone number that gets those texts/calls the most has an area code I’ve never lived in. When I needed a new direct line I chose a Florida area code because I grew up there but I’ve never lived in the 727.
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It’s in my work phone at the moment and tmobile has some pretty good spam filtering.
I’m happy to share my long term strategy to deal with spam calls/texts but every time I have I get pushback from the peanut gallery.
I have something like 6 numbers, probably soon to be 7 when I add a number to our family Gmail account. I get very very little spam across all of my numbers and the ones I do get are either the flippers, election shit or someone looking for someone who used to have that number.
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tubgirl coming in clutch…
tubgirl coming in clutch…
Or goatse, or 2 girls one cup, or lemon party…
“or”?
1 man 1 jar and Mr Hands.
Or meat swing
I love zipping up the craziest furry porn I can find into a .zip folder, telling them that my bitcoin wallet code is in there, and then watched the poor assholes unzip the file and starting the wailing and gnashing of teeth. I suppose I could start bundling malware, but I really like the psychological effects of hardcore CBT furry hyper airplane porn better. Memories that will last a lifetime :)
Memories, all alone in the moonlight…
That’s cool, but I kinda feel bad for Sabrina, who likely had no idea they were trying to contact her instead of you.
Sabrina might not even exist
Well, then whoever lived at the address OP sent multiple roofing contractors to and had to sort it out.
Feel bad for the contractors wasting their time as well
If there was a down payment made by whoever sent them out there, they’re having a pretty good day
Make sure to wait 1-3 days between each communication to drag the process out as long as possible.
Assuming USA, sue them. They owe you $500 per call after your number has been on the do-not-call registry for 31 days or after you told them not to call you again. If the violation was willful, they owe $1500 per call.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Consumer_Protection_Act_of_1991
The hardest part of this is generally finding the correct entity to serve.
Next time just tell them you’d love to sell and to meet in person
That doesn’t give you a legal address though.
A while ago, there was a story about a man who made pretty good money from filing lawsuits against companies that ignored his do-not-call requests. If the laws still allow it, it might be a good way to make them stop.
I believe that all he had to do was to keep notes about the businesses and numbers that called him and when he asked them to add him to their do-not-call lists.
I remember that and tried to find him, but it looks like there are whole law firms doing it now. Probably worth it if you have a good backlog of records. Also, now that I think of it, the guy I remember did spam faxes, which were outlawed before do not call. He worked on other people’s behalf, too, pocketing some of the payout.
Ahh finally. Injunctive relief!
I tell them I’m accepting offers of $2,000,000+. My home is worth about $100,000.
This is basically my strategy as well but I give them a number I’d legit be willing to sell for, currently it’s 3x what I paid for it, as-is with a required waiver on inspection.
It’s the top for the range of what I could sell my house for if it was in prime condition with the current markets, so it’s not unreasonable. Prime condition it absolutely isn’t (it needs several thousand worth of fixes, in addition to the several thousand I’ve already done on this cheap pos. It’s 140+ years old. It has problems), hence the waived inspection and as-is clause.
If they still want it, I’ll sell. It would save me tons of money getting it saleable.
But they never call/text back… not ever…
Apparently top of market price for the property plus “as is, waived inspection” will get them to leave you alone… and if you’d be willing to sell for that and they go for it, you win. They know you know your shit, so aren’t worth bothering, and you win if they go for it.
Where do you live that any home is only worth 100k? Even looking 100 miles away I can only find undeveloped land or dilapidated, former hoarder nests for less than 150k.
This. But where do you live in where you can find undeveloped land or dilapidated, former hoarder nests for less than 150k?
More than double that in my country.
Middle of nowhere Nebraska. It’s not a good option, but it exists
https://www.redfin.com/NE/Nebraska-City/1110-4th-Ave-68410/home/90952016
And there’s a 1/1 in the same city for $95k
The main drawback is that you have to live in Nebraska
There’s a lot of ~65k houses in Indiana, as well.
I live in a low cost area and that’s about the only place I could move to come out ahead if I sell. Because houses there cost what I paid in 2013 for roughly equivalent places… but they don’t get much weather, and I’d rather ride out the climate catastrophe in a water rich region than a wanna-be desert…
Yeah I was thinking southern Illinois or rural New Mexico would have cheap houses too, but looked in Nebraska for no reason
Wow, that’s pretty amazing!!
Living in rural America could be that cheap. But you’re in small shithole areas.
Downtown Huntington, WV definitely does have houses in that range, but it’s had a combination of elderly houses and significant population outflow over the years, and the houses date to an era from before when cars were really a thing, so you’re likely not to have a garage.
Perceived “rough” side of a major city.
I consider it my civic duty to waste as much of their time as possible. It can also serve as an outlet for creativity and have a bit of fun. Think of it as a reverse prank call.
I think my favorite was when they called on my work phone and I tried to set them up as a customer, with my most pleasant voice asking about their billing address and quoting our consulting fees and that I’d be happy to answer any question they wanted as soon as they were set up as a customer. They told me to fuck off and hung up 15 minutes later.
This was happening to me (although maybe not at that frequency). I ended up googling the property they kept asking about and found some site (clustrmaps.com) that had incorrectly associated my contact info with the property. I wrote to the company from a contact us page on their site and requested they correct the data removing my name and phone number from the property. They wrote back apologizing for the error and confirming that they had removed my info.
Have you tried searching for that property online? I wonder if you might have a similar problem where they could remove your info from that property.
I always tell them $750k cash, non sequential bills, come alone, no cops. And if they say that’s too much, relentlessly mock them for being poor until they hang up.
Depending on the property that’s a pretty good deal.
In the Bay Area, I doubt that’s even a starter home in a bad neighborhood. Most other neighborhoods are priced like that for a tear down.
I wish to see a video of someone doing this
accept selling the propeety and ghost them at an in person meetup /s
This, but not sarcastically
repeat this process EVERY time they call.
Threaten then with legal action. If they’re smart that should be enough; if they aren’t, sue them.
Tips:
- Most places in the world have laws against against disturbance of peace. Check the ones that apply to you, and mention them as you’re telling them to stop calling you.
- Start recording their calls as proof. Make sure to consistently say “do not call me further”. Depending on the place you might need to include some warning like “your call is being recorded”.
- If you can’t/don’t want to record them, at the very least annotate when they call you, and keep every single piece of text that they send you.
Tell them you will sell it for 2x what they offer and only go up from there every time they try to haggle.
You are on the right track. Starting at 2x and increasing your price is awesome!
Most of them will want to “assess the value” first or something else to keep the conversation away from money, at first. They want to try and hook you, then low-ball the fuck out of you. You need to confuse their routine at all costs.
Flipping the script will usually confuse them. If you are familiar with high pressure sales, use everything in the book. Sob stories, FOMO, extreme sense of urgency, etc. Start pressuring the fuck out of them to buy and don’t let them distract you with stupid shit.
Now that I am thinking about it, I haven’t gotten one of those calls in months. I started dumping pages of XSS and SQL injection test scripts back at automated texts so there is a chance I broke something. Dunno.
Cool. Can i have a copy of that so i can do the same?
You can find payload lists out there in the wild. Here is a repository filled with them: https://github.com/payloadbox
We use lists like these, which are generally benign, to test websites for vulnerabilities. My theory is that the software they use to manage these text messages is probably web based and not designed for this kind of input. XSS like this, if executed, could cause an endless stream of popups on their side similar the days of the wild wild web. It’s not going to hurt anything, but they won’t want to reference my text logs any more.
Obviously, there are a ton of caveats. Depending on how the message is secured in transit, your carrier might block it. I dunno as I have never worked in the mobile security space. You might piss your own phone off. You might break your own message histories…
There are a ton of unknowns, btw. I personally don’t give a fuck about any of them.
Report them to the state attorney general
So if you’ve filled a do not call, why aren’t you following up on that?
Go contact whoever operates your DNC and find out what options are available to enforce it.
“I am reporting this call to the FTC.”
If you want, you can also attempt to get a callback number and company name, state they are registered in before telling them you are reporting the call.
The more info you can report the better.
that means you also have their number right?
make a craigslist listing with content like “free concrete mixer” “free plushies” or something like that and their number as contact info, won’t work on robocalls probably
the effect is twofold: first they will get calls (originating from real numbers) from cheapskates wanting their freebies. then their number may be picked up by a crawler and get cold calls from unrelated spam operations. this all in addition to figuring out what just happened
If OP is blocking their numbers and they keep calling from new ones, most likely they’re spoofing numbers. Doing what you’re saying could in that case affect someone completely innocent
even better. numbers spoofing is illegal right?
But how do you identify who’s responsible?
Ask your own phone company. While spoofing is relatively easy, an actual connection has to be made from a real number, and your phone company should be able to provide you with the information. Unless it’s a reseller, then it will be a lot harder.
if there’s will, there’s a way. playing along might reveal some company info
They’re probably spoofing the number. Call them back to confirm before you screw up some poor bastard’s phone.
if you get it right you might force them to change phone number
while it’s a certified chaotic move, this might be not entirely legal
Sometimes when I get a call from an unfamiliar number with my area code (I don’t live there anymore so it’s always a scam spoofing a nearby number) I roleplay as a 911 operator and don’t drop the act until they hang up, threaten them with penalties for wasting public resources and such. It’s probably not strictly legal but they’re calling me illegally too so i think it pretty much evens out :)
