You are a liar and a shill for National Auto Warranty Services located in Wentzville, MO. We have seen your numerous posts all over the internet and we are on to your lies on behalf of the scumbags at National Auto Warranty Services. We will not let you or your scumbag company rip people off.

(Note: to everyone: the following refer only to the company National Auto Warranty Services located in Wentzville, Missouri. There are many other companies with a similar name that may be legitimate. Also, there is a company known as “Dealer Services.” This is the company that sends warranty expiration letters to your house with a logo that is a copy of the one used by General Motors. Guess what? It is the same company!)

National Auto Warranty Services is one of the biggest auto warranty scammers and crooks in the country. There is no way they are legitimate in any sense of the word.

Want proof? View this link, a press release from the Attorney General of Missouri:
http://ago.mo.gov/newsreleases/2008/030608.htm

They are currently being sued by Missouri for fraud and numerous violations of the state’s “No Call Law.”

In addition, they are part of a national crackdown on telemarketing fraud from the Federal Trade Commission. This press release clearly shows they were involved in both the state and a federal action:
http://ago.mo.gov/newsreleases/2008/National_crackdown_on_telemarketing_fraud_includes_three_cases_filed_by_Nixon/

You can lookup this company’s listing at the Missouri Secretary of State website. Be sure to click on the “Filed Documents” link at the top of the page. If you look under the Annual Report dated 4/3/2008, (and previous filings) you will see the home address of both the President and Vice President of this company. This is public information:
https://www.sos.mo.gov/BusinessEntity/soskb/Corp.asp?411719

In addition, this Jim Vandiver, or whoever this person really is, has listed more than one location under his profile for different posts. For example, under this post, he is from Council Bluffs, Iowa.
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/rocky-hill-ct/T3S758L7945R8ND2M

But in the following, he lists himself from Troy, NY.
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/201/RipOff0201058.htm

Guess Jim Vandiver will have to refund the $7.50 that National Auto Warranty Services paid him for his post. Good luck on your next career. Or perhaps Jim Vandiver is really Darain Atkinson, the President of National Auto Warranty Services, or Cory Atkinson, the listed Vice President. In that case, good luck in prison.

Here is how to contact these crooks:
http://www.oneautowarranty.com/
800-724-8510

Here are the owners’ addresses as listed in their Missouri corporation filing. This is public information:
Darain Atkinson (President)
1009 Hawks Landing Drive
Lake St. Louis, MO 63367

Cory Atkinson (Vice President)
20 Signal Hill
St. Charles, MO 63301

1. Answer the call nicely and sound interested
2. Play along with the rep, the first person you speak to is probably just screening calls so you may have to agree to speak with specialist or a sales person.
3. Go through the sales pitch and tell them you need to call them back with your credit card
4. Get their callback number and post it here. I’ll check back every so often. I can look to see who the phone number belongs to and also verify it with the utility company.

A little known “feature” was known as “called party hold,” where the called party could simply leave the phone off the hook during a call and the calling party wasn’t able to disconnect the call.

Call me with a scam/spam? Just a minute while I lay the receiver down and go wash the dishes. The guy at the other end simply could not disconnect the call.

I get the same “car warranty about to expire” about once a month on my land line. I get the “Credit Card Services” spam a couple of times a week. I get one or two “Unknown Caller” hangup calls a day, on average. I’ve been on the “do not call” list for years. (Fortunately, I’ve only ever gotten one spam call on my cell phone.) Not to mention the “legitimate” charity/political/opinion poll calls, mostly from groups or candidates I’ve contributed to in the past. I’ve taken to telling those groups that if they don’t take me off their call list, I won’t contribute to them any more. Seems to mostly work, i.e. they stop calling.

Last time the “Credit Card Services” crook called, I tried to ask them why they were wasting time calling me when I had told them many times to go away? Did they think I might change my mind if they annoyed me enough? When I asked them if they were stupid, they hung up. Oh, well. Usually they hang up as soon as I mention the FTC, the dnc list, ask to speak to a supervisor, etc. One time I got into an argument with one of them when I told her what she was doing was illegal and she ought to be in jail! She insisted it wasn’t illegal to call me, and kept arguing!

I used to just pick up and immediately hang up on any call without a caller ID (to stop the ringing), but then my brother in Australia sent me an email asking why I kept hanging up on him. Turns out his calls looked exactly like a blocked caller ID spam call, so I had to start answering them, or at least let them go to voicemail.

Last time the “car warranty” spammer called, I asked him why he didn’t already know what kind of car I have, and he claimed he did know, but he was asking me for security ID purposes. As if… He called me, I didn’t call him, he should know who he called, it’s me as the recipient who should need to confirm the identity of the caller. At that point I lost it, called him a liar and hung up.

My theory about hang calls… The spammer has a big room full of telemarketers, waiting to talk to victims, and time is money. They don’t want them sitting around waiting for someone to answer the phone, so they set up their automatic calling machine to do speculative dialing (much like speculative execution on a high-end CPU.) The dial a whole bunch of numbers and when some one answers, they put the calls in a queue and if none of their telemarketers becomes available in a second or two, they drop the oldest call from the queue. This way there is always someone wait when a telemarketer hangs up and is ready to deal with the next victim. If things bog down, and no one is ready for a call, they just hang up. This way, they externalize the cost of idle time. So not only are they harassing us, we are paying for the privilege! Of course, this strategy is blatantly illegal, but these people are crooks anyway, so they don’t care.

Oh, and someone asked when all this started happening. Jan 20, 2001 is my guess. And I think it will only get worse as the economy tanks, and more and more people are desperate enough to take telemarketer jobs.

That’s OK. I own two.

Hugs,
Quiet “Picking Up The Slack” Desperation

We don’t even OWN a car. And when we did own one, it was an ’89 Dodge Colt. I think any question of warranty was academic…

You’re right. Advertising isn’t about free speech. It’s about commerce, the buying and selling of a third party’s attention (that is, your and my mental space). Fortunately, commerce can (and should) be regulated much more easily than personal, political, and scientific expression.

Email has effectively been rendered useless by spam. More and more companies I deal with don’t even have email addresses anymore, and have switched to web page forms for any sort of feedback from customers.

And I want to take the people who say it’s a “free speech” issue and toss them into a wood chipper.

I do recommend the Do Not Call list, though. I haven’t had a sales call since signing up.

I was receiving one or two calls every couple of days at work. Most of the time they called at night so they left voice mail messages. They finally just stopped.

Now I wish I had picked up the phone when they called and just left the phone off the hook to run up their time.

“For nearly three in 10 households, don’t even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.”

and went on to say that a big reason for many people to do that is that they have learned to expect that any incoming call on their landline is from a telemarketer (in many cases a recorded message placed by an autodialer), so they never pick up. (They only have the landline to connect their computers.)

BTW, I’m pretty much one of the 30% in the article. My phone goes directly to an answering machine whether I am here or not, and I go through the accumulated calls quickly mostly deleting them as soon as I can tell from the quality of the sound that it’s a recording or computer-generated voice.

(In relation to a couple of points which others brought up, (1) the article mentions that using an autodialer to call cell phone numbers is illegal, but (2) pollsters want that changed because they want to be able to reach those who use their cell phones exclusively although some studies have apparently shown that the results do not seem to be substantially different whether the latter are included or not. Also (3) my vehicle is over 10 years old, and I’m at least the third owner, so clearly there’s no warranty to discuss . . . )

That after something like five million complaints.

The FCC also gets over 150,000 complaints ANNUALLY on Verizon alone (consumeradvocacy.org) and every year they “promise” to fix the problems. The overwhemling majority of the complaints are about billing errors (of course, they’re in Verizion’s favor) but then Verizon (and the rest of the industry) and the Telemarking Assoc makes $$$MILLIONS in “Campaign contributions” to Congressional members, so don’t expect any real enforcement soon.

I received a second call about the same thing a week later. Again, I tried to play along. My first question was simply, “I am interested in learning more about the services your company provides.” The guy hung up on me.

I suspect it’s an attempt to trick people. It pisses me off to think about how many people are duped – the fearful, uneducated, elderly.

the War On Terror-marketers

But paying to receive local calls with a local provider…. sheesh.

http://whocalled.us/lookup/7579908980

It seems that sometimes it is ID’d as from “Warranty Activation Center” or “Center Voice” , and in one instance they called somebody too close and revealed that they’re from Temperance, VA

https://www.donotcall.gov/ also takes complaints. While you wont necessarily get action from your specific complaint, the FTC does occasionally bust the worst offenders.

This post is already #1 on google for that number. That didn’t take long