A Way to Deal with Phone Solicitors & Junk Mail

Three Little Words that Work are “Hold  On, Please…’ Saying it while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming so boiler room sales could grind to a halt if a lot of the public did this.

Then when you eventually hear the phone company’s ‘beep-beep-beep’ tone, you know it’s time to go back and  hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task. Another little know benefit doing that is the spammer will need to hang-up on his end for a number of seconds before it will disconnect the line.

Most callers are in a hurry so they often only hang up for a second or two, which is insufficient time for the equipment to disconnect the line but they often don’t know that. It’s always fun listening to the spammer desperately trying to get a new dial tone so he can call his next victim and wasting lots of his spammer time.

(2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the  other end? This is a  telemarketing technique where an automated machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to  determine the best time of day for a ‘real’ sales person to call back and get  someone at home.

What you can do after answering, if you notice there is  no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # (pound) button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as  possible. This confuses the machine that auto-dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their call system. What a shame not to have your name in  their system any longer! 

(3)  Junk Mail Help: When you get ‘ads’  enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these ‘ads’ with your payment.  Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away.

When you get  those ‘pre-approved’ letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd  mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. 

Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs  them more than the regular 41 cents postage ‘IF’ and when they receive them  back. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was  around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In  that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these  cool little, postage-paid return envelopes.

One  of Andy Rooney’s (CBS 60 Minutes TV show) ideas. Send an ad for your  local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If  you didn’t get anything else that day, then just send them their blank  application back!
If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name  isn’t on anything you send them.

You can even send the envelope back  empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 41  cents.

The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to overwhelm them. Let’s let them know what it’s like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they’re  paying for it…Twice!

Let’s help keep our postal service busy since  they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that’s  why they need to increase postage costs again You get the idea!