Holidays are an interesting time for scamming/scambaiting. This will be the first Christmas season with BobRTC in existence and we want to ensure that it sticks around for many more holidays in future.
But we also have to balance the needs of the admins and phonebook moderators who do the work of diligently checking phonebook entries and performing system maintenance.
Since many of them will be away tending to their families over the holiday season, we will be having **Reduced Service** during this time.
Reduced Service will mean that **no new phonebook entries will be accepted systemwide, Rapid Redial will be disabled and the DialParty feature will be unavailable**. You can continue to use BobRTC as you like during Reduced Service, but without these features.
This is a perfect time to switch to the XP farming numbers that are in BobRTC to bank-up your call tokens while mods and admins are away, and to number-hunt as diligently as possible leading up to entry into Reduced Service.
The following dates are lined up for Reduced Service:
Tuesday, November 26 (Evening) thru - Saturday, November 30 (US Thanksgiving)
Monday, December 23 (Evening) thru Thursday, December 26 (Christmas)
Please note: If you’re able to contact a phonebook moderator or admin on BobRTC, if one is around they may be able to enter a number into BobRTC for you. However the phonebook will be closed off to regular users during the Reduced Service period.
I know some are disappointed with this post. Please remember that us admins/mods are humans too and some of us have families to take care of. To show our appreciation/gratitude to all of them, we are giving them all time off. We do not want to open ourselves up for disaster over Thanksgiving/Christmas due to the lack of moderators active on the site. This is to protect ourselves and the community from legal repercussions. If you need help over the holiday season, you may contact us through the usual channels. Please note that our response time will be significantly reduced, so please be patient.
**Just another shoutout,*****WE APPRECIATE ALL OUR MODERATORS AND ADMINISTRATORS*** *Just know that your work doesn't go unnoticed! Without you guys, BobRTC wouldn't be possible!*
**This will not apply until our upcoming partial service over the holidays!***(USA Thanksgiving & Christmas)*
Tolled dialing on BobRTC is still down and will remain that way for the next few days.
We planned to change our traffic later on this week but it was brought early due to a "scambaiter" who could barely be classified as anything better beyond "human garbage" entered some trash in the BobRTC phonebook and it raised several issues which I can't go into here.
If you're wondering why you now have to have an account older than several months and XP above 785XP to be able to add to the phonebook, this person is why.
Also: We are now immediately docking people who enter garbage Scammer.info links into BobRTC. You will lose 500XP and 500C whenever a BobRTC Phonebook Moderator removes a garbage link off a phonebook entry. We have some BobRTC users who run around the phonebook trying to paste the same Scammer.info link to multiple phonebook entries in order to juice their XP balance quickly so they can get access to entering numbers into the Phonebook on their alt accounts.
Now that we are requiring several months of proven activity on your account before we will accept your submissions, that should reduce the excitement to create a thousand alts.
Also keep in mind: during the holidays, especially Thanksgiving in the USA, scammer traffic that targets the elderly tends to plummet because this is the time of year that many elderly people have relatives with them at home who can easily pull them away from scams. I myself have intercepted quite a number of SSA, tech support and healthcare enrollment calls trying to reach my father during holiday visits and each garbage call that arrives has always been an educational opportunity. Some scammers recognize that and layoff during Thanksgiving and Christmas (then start right back up as soon as they assume most relatives have left).
That is right! Thank you for all that you have done for the scambaiter community having a platform created such as this has given us the ability to bring some of them down and slow down other scammers. the longer we are on them, the less people they scam and the less money they make; so, thank you to the creators and also to the entire community!! “We Exist to Protect”.
Hope everyone is having a drama-free Thanksgiving. I’ve been away tending to family medical issues and waiting for a turkey nap. I got to scambait a few calls coming to the fam’s landline that made it past Jolly Roger screening and for once I’ve finally been getting inbound SSA calls, each time a random number but it’s always the same scammer.
Looks like the bosses at the healthcare enrollment scammers were cracking the whip this week. All my phone numbers they have tagged so each time I press 2 to connect to a live agent, the agent picks up--reads the note on their ViciDial screen that I'm a scambaiter, then hangs up.