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Medicare phone spam
Lately I've been getting a lot of phone spam regarding supplemental coverage for Medicare Part A and B. The calls are made using spoofed caller ID, all beginning with the 613 area code which is designated for the Ottawa and Kingston regions. (There are a couple of other area codes used in Ottawa: 343 and 753. These were added in recent decades.)
What makes this a bit baffling is that "Medicare Part A and B" is strictly American. Virtually nobody in area code 613 will have anything to do with it. We can't use supplemental coverage for it. And the phone spam doesn't begin with a recorded message along the lines of "press 1 to speak to an agent" to at least try to reduce wasted time on the part of the live (?) humans; when one picks up the phone, the call goes directly to an agent. The callers all have strong Indian or Pakistani accents, of course, and claim to have common European-origin names. The latter is, presumably, to make them more comfortable for the senior citizens who are the primary intended victims of the scam.
I suppose it's possible that offering an insurance policy that cannot possibly be of benefit to the victim, even in theory, is one way of filtering the calls to people who are especially vulnerable? Or that their auto-dialler just calls every findable 10-digit number and assumes that it's American?
The callers are remarkably resistant to hanging up when I point out, at length, that their job is to hurt people who are old and sick, that they prey upon vulnerable citizens, that they are thugs, that they should seek counseling for their sociopathic tendencies, etc. In a calm voice and using those words. I sometimes wonder if their entire point is to keep me talking and to annoy me, rather than to try to get some benefit for themselves.
What makes this a bit baffling is that "Medicare Part A and B" is strictly American. Virtually nobody in area code 613 will have anything to do with it. We can't use supplemental coverage for it. And the phone spam doesn't begin with a recorded message along the lines of "press 1 to speak to an agent" to at least try to reduce wasted time on the part of the live (?) humans; when one picks up the phone, the call goes directly to an agent. The callers all have strong Indian or Pakistani accents, of course, and claim to have common European-origin names. The latter is, presumably, to make them more comfortable for the senior citizens who are the primary intended victims of the scam.
I suppose it's possible that offering an insurance policy that cannot possibly be of benefit to the victim, even in theory, is one way of filtering the calls to people who are especially vulnerable? Or that their auto-dialler just calls every findable 10-digit number and assumes that it's American?
The callers are remarkably resistant to hanging up when I point out, at length, that their job is to hurt people who are old and sick, that they prey upon vulnerable citizens, that they are thugs, that they should seek counseling for their sociopathic tendencies, etc. In a calm voice and using those words. I sometimes wonder if their entire point is to keep me talking and to annoy me, rather than to try to get some benefit for themselves.
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