Nuisance Telesales Calls (reprise and feedback)

It's been over a week since I signed up for the BT service which blocks calls from withheld numbers or anonymous numbers. This is the service costs £12.50 a quarter but I think it is well worth it in my own circumstances. During the past week I've only had two unsolicited sales calls, and that is a major improvement.

Nuisance Telesales Calls (again)

Several good ways to stop nuisance telesales calls. The first thing to do is go ex-directory. Getting an unlisted number is easy - just phone up BT (in the UK) on 150.

The Telephone Preference Service can help prevent nuisance telesales calls (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/and there is also a Fax Preference Service at http://www.fpsonline.org.uk/fps/) but as it is a voluntary service for professional and responsible telemarketers it does not prevent callcentres from overseas or other cowboys from bothering you, nor does it prevent the local DIY kitchen fitter touting for extra business round the block.

You can ask BT to block anonymous calls to your phone. The service costs £12.50 a quarter. This prevents all "withheld" numbers from being able to make your phone ring.

BT also has a Privacy at Home Service on 0800 121 8000 to help prevent nuisance telesales calls. There's the useful Silent Call Guard which helps prevent the "silent telephone calls" that are the unwanted by-product of RDD (Random Digit Dialling) and CPD (Computer Predictive Dialling). Again, this is a voluntary service and its signatories tend to be responsible corporations who are registered users of specific software products.

The hardware method of blocking all calls that you don't want, including nuisance telesales calls is CallBlocker (www.callblocker.co.uk) which is a physical device which you plug in between the phone and the wall socket. This box answers the phone before it rings. It plays a short message to the caller, asking them to press a key on their phone if it is NOT a sales or canvassing call, or to otherwise remove that telephone number from their database. The advantage of this is that it has to be actioned by a human, so it is guaranteed to block all automated calls from getting through. At £69.95 you have to decide if it's really worth it for you. CallBlocker's phone number is 0870 444 3969.

Domain Name Expiration Notice Scam

Two letters come from the grandly named Domain Registry of America. These warn me that two of my domains will be coming up for re-registration in September, and if I don't pay them a bit of money then my websites will be lost forever.

The address of the Domain Registry of America is 56 Gloucester Road (Suite 526), in London, clearly an accommodation address if ever there was one. Beneath a lot of quasi-officialese drivel is the solicitation to punish my credit card up to the tune of £55 per domain.

A quick search on Google shows that the set-up is run by two men, Daniel Klemann and James Tetaka, both popular attendees of courtrooms in Toronto, Canada, where they have already been convicted of this scam, twice in Klemann's case. Despite being told by the judge that they should stop this behaviour they are still at it, operating under the company name 1473253 Ontario Inc, which is run by a Peter Kuryliw, also of Toronto. See http://blog.forret.com/blog/2004/12/domain-registry-of-america-scam.html for further details.

It gives me great pleasure to post back both "invoices", uncompleted, and without a stamp, back to their accommodation addresses, knowing that the scamsters will incur postal charges.

Can it Get Worse?

One of my ISP's representatives has sent me another email which again denies what I say actually happens. They write:

"I have again tried this within my control panel and can not duplicate the error you are experiencing and our support team and product development team have also confirmed that they can not establish this error. "

Here is my response.

"Attached are four gif files. See the pictures.

"It is 3.34 in the afternoon, and my resold account [domain].com has been deactivated for some time. The Reseller Bandwidth Alert can be seen clearly set at 7GB which is your default setting.

"At 3.35 I reactivate the account. The button says "Suspend Account Now" because it is now in active mode.

"At 3.36 I scroll up the page to find that the Reseller Bandwidth Alert quite clearly says UNSET.

"At 3.37 I have to manually reset it to 8 GB, otherwise this account will be left unmonitored, and will be liable for any bandwidth excesses going unannounced, whether it is 4.02 in the morning or indeed at any other time when your customers may be awake.

"In other words, this is EXACTLY what I have been saying happens, and I have been saying it now for over four months.

"Did it occur to you that I only noticed this because of my unusually large number of accounts? If I had only one or two accounts, or even a dozen, then I probably would not have noticed the same tiny behaviour pattern replicated over and over on each account when a bandwidth excess issue was detected. So most people would not notice this, and I hate to think of all these other people whom you have suckered by this means. Clearly it's a nice little earner for you.

Yours sincerely,"

I await the response.

Bad ISP in Huge Corporate Denial Shock Horror

It gets worse!

My ISP, [nameless, for the moment], has gone into a state of corporate denial. The mindgames it is inflicting upon itself are awesome. Here's what their latest reply is. This time the matter had been passed to someone else in the original person's "absense".

"I was keen to query the issues you had raised with regards to ourbandwidth alert facility so checked this on one of my accounts. I went into my reseller MSW and clicked on suspend account. I then checked on our support tools and the 7gb limit was still there. I looked on the screen in the reseller MSW and it was listing the resold account with the drop downlist as 'Unset'."

Hooray! They've acknowledged they're at fault, then? Er, not quite.

"However, after checking this with our product development team and confirming what they advised in my own control panel, this is purely only superficial, and does not mean the bandwidth alert is unset."

Er, so when it says Unset, it doesn't really mean that it's unset? (Translation: "It read 'Unset', but the Techy guys said it was okay really, so it's okay really".)

Then the real doublethink whammy:

"The only way the bandwidth would become reset would be if the the account was updated manually immediately after suspending or activating an account and not checking what the drop down was set to."

Which is what I've been telling them for over four months. But now they seem to be using this to support their own case!

Reality: the drop down that they have just described would indeed be set to "Unset", meaning that the Alert system is disabled and their customers would be unaware of any excess bandwidth taking place (until they got the large bill at the beginning of the following month).

I replied by email, stating that their analysis was incorrect, and I attached (for the fifth time) my PDF of the event. I also made it clear that I would not, under any circumstances, pay for a service which is designed to be disabled as soon as it discovers that it needs to be especially active.

You do not provide a safety net when the drop is five feet, then take it away when the drop becomes 100 feet.

I'm awaiting their reply, but I get the impression that they are just passing the problem round to different people within the organisation to see who can doublethink the best. That's the stage they're at at the moment. As with all cases of denial, they know they are wrong really; it just depends on choosing the right words to make it seem okay.

I'm considering escalating this to the CEO. This may save some time and produce some sense. In the meantime, I KNOW you're all wanting to see the PDF for yourselves, but please be patient. I've been patient for over four months, after all. See the mission statement in my first post of this blog. They'll be allowed their own time to sort this out. (I'm assuming that at some stage they will see that what I'm telling them is for real. I live in hope.)

Bad ISPs for another posting

There has been no response to my last email. I will have to name names soon. For those of you who remain patient, Thank you for being patient! There's not a lot I can do. If they refuse to reply to me then I will just have to wait. They may have a logical response or get-out clause, I just don't know. But I don't like doing nothing while I know they are ripping off other people.

Bad ISPs (continued)

I cannot believe that [name of my ISP] has responded with the following email:

"I was not aware of any issues with the bandwidth alerts, and have taken the opportunity to check the issue raised by yourself with our product development team who advised that the system is working correctly, and did not find any evidence to the contrary.

"Here at [NAME OF ISP] we always try to support our conclusions with the information we have available and I can assure you have that I have been very thorough in trhis [sic] investigation, which believes us to deem the way forwards acceptable and reasonable [sic]."

In other words they have not acknowledged what I have been telling them for the last four months.

For those of you who have emailed me to say that you want me to publish who this ISP is, I know it might be uncomfortable being on tenterhooks like this, but I refer you to the original mission statement set out in the first post of this blog. So in order for the ISP to sort out this problem they must first recognise that it exists. In the same way as the addict must recognise the problem before recovery may take place. Yes, I agree that four months is a long time, but here there may be plenty of scope for departments not communicating with each other. Of course the techy people will say there's nothing wrong if the system is working perfectly according to their brief. Because, by definition, that would have been their brief in the first place.

This underpins the whole point: is this Alert Unset feature a fault, or is it part of the system? If it is a fault, then it should be put right. If it is not a fault then it is part of the system spec and so the techies will not report it back as a fault. From this we can infer that it is merely company policy that this thing (which seems like a fault) is in place to rip customers off.

I have emailed the ISP back with an attachment, which is an illustrated PDF guide to what happens specifically. I have sent this twice before and it seems that it has not been read.

In the meantime the ISP has charged me yet another £240 for excess bandwidth usage!

Bad ISPs Again

Bad ISPs are again in the forefront. The problem with bad ISPs is that they never seem to get any better because they fail to learn from their mistakes.

One of my ISPs took a week to correct a fault which prevented an email redirect address from working.

Another bad ISP of mine (I certainly collect them) has had an ongoing issue with excess bandwidth usage. They have charged me around £1500 for excess bandwidth usage, for which I have refused to pay. The reason I refuse to pay is that they have a faulty bandwidth alert system, which is actually disabled when a bandwidth overuse issue becomes apparent.

Yes, that's right. When their system identifies that a website has potential bandwidth excess problems it disables the bandwidth alert! Then presents the website owner with a large bill at the beginning of the next month. But the website owner has no idea that excess bandwidth has been incurred. S/he knows that if there is a problem an email will be sent out so that the problem can be rectified. But there is no email. Just an unexpected invoice and a threat of shutting the website down.

So is this "feature" of their system a fault, or is it something which has been set in place by design? That is what my ISP (which will remain nameless for the time being) is not happy to tell me. I asked it two days ago if it acknowledged that the problem existed, or alternatively they realised that the problem did exist and so they were quite happy about it. So far they have not replied. Taking legal advice, I imagine.

I have a nice little ebook to illustrate their alert disablement process. I don't think they want me to show it to anyone (and so far I haven't). Watch this space for developments.