Has "Rachel of cardholder services" been pestering you?

Three times today I've received a robo-call: "Hello, this is Rachel from cardholder services.  There is no problem with your account…"  By then I've generally hung up.  We get these calls about once a week or more.  The three times in one day was a bit much.

I Googled "Rachel" and "cardholder services" and got a long list of complaints of this scam and violation of the "Do Not Call" law.  One example is  "Hard to stop telemarketing calls from 'Rachel'", David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times, 2011-11-29.

Lazurus writes that Rachel is calling from cardmember services, but she actually says "cardholder services".

Cardmember services is the name of a legitimate company that services credit cards.  The use of "cardholder" is a deception that many don't recognize.

You can file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at https://www.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx.

An offensive against spammers or a counter-attack by spammers?

Twice early this morning I was sent "Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours". It was in response to two of the three messages I sent yesterday to PayPal and two banks about phishing with a copy to FTC Spoof .

Either the FTC was overwhelmed with forwarded spam or spammers tried a denial-of-service attack last night. Let's hope it's the former, which is bad enough. Let's also hope that the authorities are finding lots of these crooks and putting them out of business. I saw an estimate that over a third of the Internet traffic is spam!!

See also "Phishing against which bank this week?"

Phishing against which bank this week?

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