@rnmissionrun I had a similar one once that was... beyond. My husband was listening in from the next room on and off at the time and he swears to this day he has genuinely never in his life seen me a fraction as angry as I was with the person on this call. It was bad enough that we did actually follow up with the FCC and some other federal org as well as calling the corporate office of the company that had been named in the call to register a formal complaint about their call center's antics; I don't recall which off-hand but I know I got a call from some division of the FBI (involving scams or fraud?) that was apparently looking into it which was a really enlightening chat (and was not brief, either). It became doubly obvious somebody had actually followed up on it from the legal end because one of the bigwigs at whatever company this was called to more or less beg forgiveness and swear up one side and down the other they were not going to do whatever, and was the only person I spoke to who was not clearly calling from an international telemarketing farm in broken English.
This one was a scam that's particularly aggravating, but a lot of y'all will never have to deal with (I hope). Anybody who runs their own business or has registered a business has probably gotten something along these lines more than once, though. Mainly, there are companies that provide 'helpful listings of BtoB services by category' (and whatnot) that then enter all of your business data they can get a hold of to sell to other companies. This happened a lot with web site registrations back when, it happens with state listings of 'this is now a business', and there are other ways it happens, too -- there are folks paid to go to trade shows of every stripe and just pick up every business card they can find to enter the data. (That's how they grabbed ours, at a craft show; the specific info they had was the information we had only on that card and only at that show that year.)
They don't ask you, and they don't inform you in any way. They just list you in their database and create a registry, which they then sell access to to other businesses. A lot of them do this when starting out, so they can appear to have a broad range of existing clients in order to attract new clients.
Well, that business no longer exists and hasn't for well over a decade now. (Do we still get calls asking for it because of this crap? YARP.) Needless to say, usually when you say, "Remove my listing, this business is not active," they just shrug and hang up and bother you again next year. I'd like to say they remove inactive listings, but I pretty much doubt it, because, hey, LOOK AT ALL THE CLIENTS WE HAVE! (Accuracy? Pfft, that's for the legitimate companies!)
This time, when I said, "Remove the listing, that business has not existed for at least a decade," this shitpile of a stain on humanity demanded I pay them over $1k for 'providing the listing for 6 years'. Yes, they listed a business that had already been defunct for at least 4 years at the time in their database, without my knowledge or permission, and were now demanding a pile of money to remove it from the listing for 'the service they had provided'. When I asked, "So, you're admitting this is what you did, and now you expect money for it?" ...and the guy actually admitted that, yes, that's exactly what they were doing. Not even kidding here.
The screaming was genuinely legendary. I am pretty certain the neighbors heard me. This asshole kept me on the line for over half an hour demanding I owed them this money.
Needless to say, when said 'bigwig' called to assure me they wouldn't be asking for a penny from me and would remove me from their listings and would not bother me again, and would be firing the call center employee and that person's manager, I was like, "Cool."
When he asked if I would retract the complaint with the FCC/etc., I pleasantly replied, "Oh, no. I'm afraid I won't be doing that. Your entire business model is disingenuous and exploitative. If you aren't doing anything shady, you don't have anything to worry about, right?"
Cue nervous laughter. "I understand, ma'am."
I cannot begin to express the loathing I have for that business model, and it's really goddamned popular. The shady ones just sell their outdated databases to each other after a while, so every so often, every few years, we get a round of calls asking for the information that was only ever on that one iteration of the business card...
