As we wrote about at the beginning of July, Paypal had rolled out a new user agreement, or Terms of Service (TOS) that included your agreeing to their robocalling or autodialing you, not just for account updates and fraud alerts, but for marketing as well. Now they have backed off from that.

Effective today, July 1, 2015, Paypal’s new User Agreement (Terms of Service) goes into effect. It contains lots of small changes, and one big one: You consent to receive autodialed or prerecorded calls and text messages from PayPal at any telephone number that you have provided us or that we have otherwise obtained. Which is why we’re putting together a list of Paypal numbers from which Paypal calls.

The phone spam calls start out essentially the same, “Hi, this is Rachel from cardholder services..” or “Hi, this is Rachel from cardmember services…”.. then usually it will either say something like “..calling in reference to your current credit card account. It is urgent that you {take some action}”, or “Please hold for an important message…” or she will ask you to select from several options with your phone’s touch pad. Most often it is “Press 1 to speak to an operator, press 2 to be removed from the call list.” Stacey and Stacy have been making a lot of these calls too, about extended warranties. These are so-called “robocalls” – generated (often overseas) with the Rachel or other similar script and computerized dialing, and almost always peddaling some scam, be it debt relief, credit card consolidation, mortgage refinancing, or some similar financial scam. It has gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ran a “Robocall Challenge”, offering a $50,000 reward for the best proposed technology to deal with the burgeoning robocall problem.

You may be surprised – and you will certainly be relieved – to hear that the criminals behind the scam warranty phone calls – or so-called “robocalls” or “robodialing” – have actually been caught, and are being prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It turns out that a huge number of the calls were made by Christopher Cowart and his Transcontinental Warranty company, calling names and numbers supplied by a company called Voice Touch that is owned by James Dunne and Maureen Geisen Dunne, and using Caller I.D. spoofing technology developed by Damian Kohlfeld.