Recently we have received questions much like this one:
[quote]
Good afternoon,
I have been enjoying BobRTC and have used it quite a bit lately. However, I've come across a few numbers linked to Life Protect 24/7 and believe they may be wrongly listed on your website. After doing some research, it seems almost all of the complaints against this business have been resolved and it has accumulated several hundred positive reviews. The representatives seem to be certified and trained call center employees who work by the hour. Here are a few articles I read:
https://www.bbb.org/us/va/norfolk/profile/medical-alarm/life-protect-247-0583-90049236/complaints
https://bestcompany.com/medical-alert-systems/company/life-protect-24-7
Even if their practice is targeting elderly folk, their intention doesn't seem to be to scam them, but to provide them a service. They seem to be very responsive when discussing refunds to unhappy customers. I only want to scambait people that are actual scammers, not legitimate businesses. Please explain to me if this is a a legitimate business.
https://REMOVED/phonebook/dial/18882223553
This is our response:
[quote]
Life Protect 24/7 unwittingly places themselves on to lead generator services that capture people who dial wrongly-dialed toll-free telephone numbers and routes them to their center. Since this is potentially millions of phone numbers, it's not possible to avoid Life Protect 24/7 even if one wanted to.
A number of scams operate on lead generator numbers most notably the "free Caribbean cruise" and "$100 Walmart Gift card" scams which are a constant presence on Lead Generator numbers.
Further, Life Protect 24/7 is facing a current false advertisement practices lawsuit by another medical alert company in California, for passing along advertisements pretending to be Life Alert rather than the Virginia-based company that they are.
The only thing that we can do is remove numbers that are direct routes to Life Protect. If they want to stop receiving all the nonsense calls they would need to withdraw from putting themselves out on lead generator numbers.
Because often a toll-free carrier will route a parked telephone number to their lead generator IVR, in many cases a number that gets posted to BobRTC for a genuine scam can change character when the scammer stops paying for toll-free-forwarding service. Instead of a message intercept when the number is shut off by the scammer, the number now goes to a lead generator---and it's often Life Protect that is the ad, with "this is Jessica on a recorded line"---in which case "Jessica" is actually a voice-recognition IVR bot that is set up to try to throw away calls not being made by seniors and redirect anyone who is of a certain age or older to Life Protect's call center for a hard sales pitch.
Because Life Protect has chosen, willingly, to cast this wide of a net fishing for leads, there isn't any technology available to avoid reaching them, other than pressing 2 or # on the lead generator bot to skip the "are you 50 years of age or older?" question on the Lead Generator which always leads to them and try something else.
[/quote]In short, we're always going to be calling the lead generator service because scams advertise on them. If people decide it's the "golden hour" and decide to patch through to Jessica and talk to her, they can and they will. They'll also do it on their own equipment, not just BobRTC. This has been happening for years on FireRTC, on Google Voice, etc.
Life Protect sits on the Lead Generator IVR because it apparently does snag quite a number of confused seniors who manage to end up with an alarm contract from them to make it worthwhile. Since Lead Generator bots are a ruse operating on toll-free numbers that do not have an active subscriber; the whole pitch begins with an untold little white lie.
If Life Protect wants to end the suffering they could withdraw from the lead generator service.