Yesterday you went out and bought a cell phone. That was around lunch time, and since then you've been receiving calls on your new phone every 10 minutes or so from someone offering to sell you phone insurance.
What's all this about? Didn't your provider clearly state that they never divulge or sell customer information to third-party companies? Fact is, they may be telling the truth.
What are cold-callers? And who are they?
A cold-caller is a person who makes unsolicited calls to various people hoping to make a sale. They sell different products and are overtly very kind, but for the sake of keeping with the topic this article talks about cell phone insurance cold-callers.
A cold-caller selling phone insurance starts by trying to convince you how dangerous a place society can be for cell phone owners. He/She might even throw in some cell phone-related crime statistics just to shake your ground. Then comes the solution, phone insurance, and the cold-caller pronounces it slowly and tastefully like it was sent from above. The average person could easily fall for this trick.
Cold-callers work directly for phone insurance companies. But some cold-callers are actually fraud artists looking to make a quick buck. So how did they get a hold of your cell phone number in the first place?
Hello, stranger
Is it possible for a cell phone insurance company to call your new cell phone without your provider giving away your customer information? It is. You'll be surprised how easy and cheap it is to pull off.
All a cell phone insurance company has to do is buy a cheap handset from a provider. Then the company representative simply dials the handset's own number, changing some of the digits to the number before or after it. After several tries someone who has recently bought a new cell phone will pick up. Since the cell phone is still new it's probably not even insured yet, and that's how cold-callers get their business.
The only way to avoid cold-callers is to not fall for their tricks in the first place. Be careful with answering a call from a number you don't recognize. If you feel it's a cold-caller on the line and you're not interested, simply hang up and don't look back.