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| EngageTel Inc. www.engagetel.com |
| 13th of Nov, 2011 by User796975 |
| EngageTel provides telephone service exclusively to telemarketers, and offers this upstanding demographic anonymity and safe harborage from abuse complaints. In other words, EngageTel is a telephone variant on the theme of "bulletproof hosting." On November 14 2011, I received the latest in a string of TCPA-noncompliant illegal telemarketing calls to my cellular phone about mortgage refinancing. Noncompliant elements of these calls includes (1) telemarketing to a cellular phone, (2) failure to identify the caller, and (3) use of automated calling. The number originating the call was 616-971-0256, operated by Earthlink Business but with service sold through wholesaler EngageTel. Such details are inscrutable to the ordinary consumer, and require a bit of focused effort to uncover. Anyway, one would hope that EngageTel would be responsive to complaints about its customers, reviewing feedback on client behavior, disconnecting service that is used outside of TCPA compliance, and helping with positive ID of callers who don't fulfill their own legal obligation to identify. But EngageTel expressed no interest in being helpful to me when I lodged a complaint. In fact, they suggested the following: "It is possible that you have 'opted in' with your cell phone as your contact number and are unaware that you have done so." Stop for a moment and ponder the simple ridiculousness of this telemarketing-industry shibboleth: in their delusion of grandeur, people are actually so interested in being dialed on their own dime by telemarketers that they are rushing to SIGN UP! (And yet, for some odd reason, the operators need to obscure their identity and take every effort to not hear from pesky people who didn't want the call.) Seriously. Try to wrap your brain around that monument to pure idiocy. Speaking of obfuscating identity, EngageTel is operated out of a small residence in Cheyenne (the address obtained from their business records with the Secretary of State of Wyoming) that is already infamous for identity laundering, including harborage of jailed Ukrainian extortionists, gambling rings, fraudulent online pharmacies, and similar highbrow elements society. Reuters ran an expose last year, see: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628 So chalk up another ne'er-do-well under the Gerald Pitts empire of obscurity: EngageTel Inc, telemarketers' best friend. |
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| Rebuttal to Crank "report": This anonymous individual has it wrong. EngageTel provides compliance services to Call Centers, which are businesses that call other businesses and consumers for the purposes of collecting debt, political consulting, charitable solicitations and yes, marketing products and services. We provide traceable telephone numbers to our clients to use in their calling, making them accessible by and accountable to the FCC and other federal and state agencies that may be investigating reports of improper calling. As with many other businesses, we are contractually obligated to protect the privacy of our clients unless we receive a valid subpoena, and would open ourselves up to liablity and potential litigation for violating our contracts should we give out our clients' information without a subpoena. This person came to us over the Internet and demanded to know the contact information of the company that called him. We explained that we would need a subpoena to provide the information he was seeking. We advised him to file a complaint with a consumer protection agency if he felt he had been wronged, and also offered to place him on a Do Not Call list that would prohibit any of our clients from calling him in the future, however he refused this service. We do not know this anonymous poster, and are not interested in placing our company at risk of liability to cooperate with him. After going back and forth with him using email, his messages became more demandiing and less civil, the last of which was very profane. We will not be communicating with him again. While telemarketing is certainly not popular, it is nevertheless legal if done properly. Our clients use our services because they want to be legal, and they do not want to call anyone that does not want to be called. EngageTel processes thousands of Do Not Call requests every day, enabling the people that were called to not be called again by our clients (EngageTel has a very small client base relative to the number of Call Centers in the US, so filing a DNC request with us does not guarantee that they will never be called by a marketing company in the future). We advise anyone reading the complaint against EngageTel to understand that the complaint was made by a disgruntled individual for all intents and purposes anonymous to EngageTel, "paying us back" because we were not able to cooperate with him based on common business practices and nondisclosure rules. This person is not interested in not being called, he is out to do damage. Please view his comments about our company in that regard. |
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