OK, I’ve wanted to do this for months but I was quite unsure how to go about it.
In some places in the USA, bandit signs are illegal. These were illegally put up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A bandit sign is a corrugated plastic sign, always advertising a phone number IN BIG FONT with some cheesy pitch like DIABETES TEST STRIPS or WE WILL BUY YOUR HOUSE IN SEVEN SECONDS, but the most common type of illegal ad is for real estate warehousing.
While the business of real estate warehousing is legal, this type of advertisement is not legal where it was placed. It's illegal because:
1) a city council wrote a law banning them
2) they are a visual blight
3) no way to identify the company doing the advertisement, most of these phone numbers go to cheap cell phones
We have had citywide campaigns asking millions of people to hunt these signs and get them off the lamp posts they were illegally nailed to. And the City of Philadelphia once paid some interns with money from the local electric utility (who own the poles these signs are being attached to), to robodial and basically torture the idiots who pollute the streets and highways with these things.
I'll let the mods decide this one. If you feel this is too risky, please flag the post. Personally, I dial these idiots and I go to our local neighborhood Facebook pages which have 20,000+ users each on them each (Philly + suburbs is 6 million people) when homeowners bitch about these exploitative signs I always encourage neighbors and residents to dial them and waste their time.
Their business is to trick old residents into selling their homes way below market value (I'll take that house off your hands fa$$$$t!!!), convert it into a rental or sell it to a builder or another developer who intends to demolish the house and rebuild.
It's a different type of house flipping where you don't give a fuck about the house, or who you're buying it from--you just want the deed to the lot and the house comes extra. Your job as a warehouser is to turn an easy profit finding an exit strategy for the house. You pump houses through your "network" of buddies to feed them on to developers, homebuilders and people looking to make money being a landlord. They call this an "income opportunity".
And the industry of real estate warehousing works a lot like Amway or MLM where people go to coaching seminars, hook up with direct lenders and loan sharks to get "source cash". It's quite a trip.
These guys all chase down money yet they advertise the cheapest way possible and leave these shit signs in their wake as they go.
