We all deal with spam in our inbox everyday, but it disgusts me how far some companies will go nowadays. About a year ago, a company from Canada started calling my cell phone trying to give me information on health insurance. They were quite rude with me when I kindly stated that I never requested information from them, and even if I had, I wouldn't have used my cell phone number as the contact. Their calls persisted for a few days, until I finally got ugly, exchanged a few words with the supervisor, and threatened to file a police report for harassing me.
Aside from the constant calls from Dell when I'm ONE DAY late on my payment, I haven't had to deal with any more spam calls...until...
This morning I had my second run in with a company calling my cell phone trying to sell something to me. After a late night last night, I slept through the entire morning, and all of the calls, but that didn't stop this company. I have one of those free incoming call phonelines through aim that I use as my temporary business line right now. I love it because when I'm away from the computer, or I don't want to deal with business stuff, I just shut off aim, and the calls are directly sent to my free voicemail. As soon as I sat down to get some work done today, I opened my aim dashboard and saw 3 calls from the same number that constantly called my cell phone. I went straight to google, and my first search result confirmed my fears, another spam company! The first result I hit is a webhosting forum where tons of others are experiencing calls from the same company. Aplus.net is the harassing company, and it seems they like to randomly call people who have just registered for a domain name trying to sell them hosting. I find this quite funny because I have NOT registered for a domain name. I have inquired about purchasing one, but no where have I included any of my personal info. So, if you register a domain, watch out for 877-577-0877. They are only out to try to harass you into buying their webhosting services.
3 comments:
I can't stand unethical (not to mention illegal) business practices. Luckily I have nothing but time and I'm willing to go after these people. I've been posting in multiple forums the results of my phone conversations with APLUS.NET as well as my conversation with the FCC who confirmed it is illegal to use an automated dialer to call a cell phone. Below is the post I made on whocalled.us.
Here is some important information. #1 - If they are calling your Mobile Phone with an automated dialer, you don't have to be on the Do Not Call registry.
#2 - If you want to let APLUS.NET how you feel about their practices, Ken Thompson is the Call Center Director and can be reached at: 913-890-7700 Ext. 6980 but you probably won't get any further than I did, so do the same thing I did:
Call the FCC (1-888-225-5322) and file a complaint. Mr. Thompson told me that they had no way of knowing it was a mobile number, but the FCC Said otherwise and forwarded a detailed version of my complaint to the Enforcement division, so I urge anyone getting calls from APLUS.NET on their cell phone to call and file a complaint. Mr. Thompson also admitted to getting contact information from WHOIS Listings, which is a violation of the Terms and Service for many WHOIS Services. Mr. Thompson refused to tell me which services they use and called it irrelevant, but here is the TERMS OF USE from Whois.org:
"TERMS OF USE: You are not authorized to access or query our Whois
database through the use of electronic processes that are high-volume and
automated except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or
modify existing registrations;"
Thank you for this information!
You're welcome. :) The FCC sent me a follow up letter also, they said I gave them all of hte information they needed and the matter has been passed to their enforcement division. :)
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