Over the past week, I’ve been telemarketed to by two different organizations that sound shady as hell.

I’ll tell you about the second one first: The recorded caller urges you to visit a particular website, operationcashcow.com*. Not a lot on the site itself, just a prompt for some information. Okay, forget that. A whois record for the site reveals it to be owned by a company in Buffalo called Cash Secrets. It gives their phone number as 206-350-3067. Funny, that’s not even in the same state as Buffalo . . . Buffalo’s area code is 716; 206 belongs to Seattle, way over on the opposite coast! Call ID revealed a different number: 206-666-6145.

The earlier one tells you to call 618-355-1179, with no details except a promise of earning $1000+ per month with an automated system. Interestingly, they have registered their phone number as a website, and it gives some information that should scare anyone who values not hearing from telemarketers . . .

. . . it seems that those sho sign up for the one “system” end up setting up an automated calling system, which, in turn, generates these calls.

Oh shit.

It really reminds me of the publishing houses in the 80’s and 90’s that would sell you these “work from home” kits, where you would be paid a pittance for mailing out “reports” to other suckers about how they can make big money mailing out reports to other suckers about how they can make big money mailing out reports to other suckers about . . . you get the idea. This appears to be the telemarketing equivalent of it.

But it gets better!

It seems that they ignore your Do Not Call status. I am on the Do Not Call registries, both the one that New York State established, and the one that the Federal Government established a year or so later. No telemarketers should be calling me, period. I think that the operators of these systems know this, but have actually developed this mechanism so that the sucker who buys in is now the responsible party for the calls. They’re not going to have the resources to process the lists of do-not-call records properly, and now the liability for these has been shifted to some unwitting sucker.

I can’t wait until they start calling cell phones. This is going to be so much fun, I could just shit.

(* I thought about not including the site name, or the phone numbers, but it occurred to me that others besides me might be searching on these terms, so I may as well make my experience available.)