Phone spam from fembots
I’m using the phrase “phone spam” to mean repeated, unsolicited, and undesired phone calls, often generated by automated equipment.
Within days of getting a new cell phone number, I started getting annoying calls from a collection agency seeking information about a person I have never heard of. Humor, reason, and polite requests did not prevent the calls. Fits of screaming didn’t work either.
Rhonda
Many of the calls came from a fembot named Rhonda (or maybe Wanda). My attempts to chat with Rhonda failed, but I did get confirmation that she is a machine and I learned she is employed by Receivables Performance Management. I decided to record my interactions with the company.
Receivables Performance Management (RPM)
Calls came from these phone numbers:
- 240-210-7113
- 434-533-9030
- 703-291-9039
This company is a debt collector registered in the State of Washington. About December 11, 2009 I told a company employee that they may not contact me by any means except postal mail, and followed up a few days later with this letter (pdf) to their registered agent. The calls have stopped. I’m assuming that they will continue to act in good faith, but readers can check back here to find out what happens.
Jan 10, 2010: I was going to post the text of my letter, instead of a pdf of the scanned copy, so that search engines could index it. Google surprised me -- they have already performed optical character recognition (OCR) of the scanned image. They even cleanly omitted my exacto-knife redactions.
- Another case study of RPM.
- August 2007 article in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer .
- Know the enemy: debt collectors have a professional organization named ACA International, which publishes Collector magazine.