Fake fundraising scam asking for donations that they keep for themselves. This is a fake charity fundraising scam! 99% of these unsolicited phone calls from charity fundraisers that pretend to raise money for veterans, police, firefighters, breast cancer, autism, colleges and schools, and other seemingly worthy causes are ALL SCAMS!! If you want to donate to these causes, do your own research, research the Charity Navigator website, and you will find reputable charities that actually donate most of the collected money to the actual cause that they represent. All these other fake fundraising scams keep all of the collected money for themselves, some of these fake fundraisers purposely overcharge your credit card by thousands of dollars and then disappear, and they all really ruin the trust that people have for the reputable charities. These donation scams happen throughout the year, but there is always a huge increase in donation scams during November and December to prey on people who are in a generous holiday spirit. Many of these fake fundraising scammers use automated interactive voice response (IVR) software that sounds human but a bit stiff and robotic, and you are initially talking to a software-based robot who asks you some questions before transferring you to a real human who steals your credit card number. The robot caller usually begins the call by asking "Hi, is the head of the household there?" or "Hi, is (your name) there?" to try to gain your trust. It is easy to set up IVR robo-dialing to automatically match the name that the robot asks for on the phone call to the name that is associated with phone numbers and addresses on phone marketing database CDs that anyone can purchase. Many of the thousands of India phone scammers also use these same phone databases and they sometimes ask for you by name to try to gain your trust. More than 95% of all North America phone scams originate from crowded phone rooms in India that run numerous fraud, extortion, and money laundering scams every day, but most of these fake charity donation scams are run by American scammers, at least for now before the East Indian scammers decide to try it. Nowadays, NEVER trust any unsolicited caller who supposedly represents a charity, a US/Canadian pharmacy, a computer support person saying your computer has a virus, or a fake robotic recording of a Social Security or IRS officer saying you have unpaid back taxes. They all use fake Caller ID or VoIP phone numbers that they change every day. Legitimate businesses never use hundreds of area codes and tens of thousands of fake Caller ID phone numbers where you cannot call them back. They are all FAKE and they all try to steal your credit card information to charge thousands of dollars or they ask for your bank and personal identity information. Anyone, including you, can use telecom software or a third-party service to phone using fake names and phone numbers that show up on Caller ID. It is really very simple and easy to avoid phone and email scams. Sometimes I love to play with these scammers by pretending to be a gullible target and stringing them along on the phone call for 30 or 60 minutes so I can at least waste their time and prevent them from scamming someone else while I cook and eat and toy with them.

January 30, 2020

Robo call to solict donation

January 28, 2020