I saw an article today entitled DETROIT MAN PLEADS GUILTY TO USING FAKE 1-800 NUMBERS at fraudbaron.com. Digging into the article though it’s really an example of Directory Assistance and Misdial Marketing Fraud. The toll free numbers weren’t fake. He simply got number listed with Directory Assistance as the numbers for a big company, in this case Black & Decker. And then he answered the phone as if he were customer service for B&D.

Before we added the enhanced voicemail service which plays a greeting and gives callers a menu of options, we used to get a lot more wrong numbers. And I can tell you from personal experience that callers will tell you anything if they think you are a big company. I’m only saying this to caution people. I used to have fun with them because getting mad at them is counter productive. And even telling them it’s the wrong number doesn’t solve it because that only makes them call back again costing you more time and money.

I used to make up some pretty strange things and they always believed it because they were sure you were the people they were trying to reach. I told people to wrap aluminum foil around their tv until we could send someone to fix it and told one woman who wanted to book a flight to Puerto Rico that it was closed on Tuesdays. The person they were looking for went home sick with a pigmy attack or that we were under some kind of chemical attack so the person or business they were looking for wasn’t going to be available for a while.

I know this sounds ridiculous and I probably shouldn’t admit it but the point is that you shouldn’t believe that just because you got a number from a directory listing, that it is automatically who they say they are. I wasn’t doing this to hurt anyone. It was just a little good clean fun, but there clearly are some people that do take advantage of people like this.

If you think you have made a mistake and given out your information to the wrong company, do some research and find the correct toll free number for the company you were looking for and look that up with our Toll Free Search Engine. Then look up the number you called and it should have the same description. If it doesn’t say the same thing email us and we’ll tell you the phone company responsible for each of them. Then you can contact that phone company to see if they are both controlled by the same organization.

Unfortunately there is no easy whois system for 800 numbers, but this can help to confirm if it’s controlled by a different phone company and that your information may be at risk.

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