How is this OK?

They get VINs from public records (DMV,Secretary of State Offices, etc.) from there it's easy to spew SPAM be it Voice, SMS, Email or Snail Mail.

 

okay? it's expected in the auto world. which part isn't a den of thieves?

 

Get them all the time. Expect the FINAL is not really FINAL. You will keep getting the same notice for years to come, even after you get rid of the car. LOL. Mine goes straight to trash. In addition to postal marketing, they keep calling my phone with never-ending FINAL NOTICEs. It is an automated call but spoofed to local calling numbers, blocking the number will only prevent the same number, but still receive from the different numbers on a daily basis. The prompt actually askes me to "press 1" to talk to the representative, and "press 2" to remove from the calling list. I have pressed "2" so many times, but they never remove my number from the calling list.

Nowadays, I get more junk mail and spam calls than real mails or calls.

 

Well not illegal; because they did disclose who they are, in your second pic. - I have seen much finer print; requiring a magnifying glass. It is amoral; when you look at the post card - It's clear they are targeting older people; trying to scare them into buying their insurance. Here's further info: US Automotive Protection Services | Better Business Bureau® Profile
This is one of the few good things about the internet; It makes it tougher on scammers. Car Shield is another one; they are not licensed/allowed to operate in California - yet their advertisement is all over the place here in central California. Not cheap post cards either, I talking about high-dollar TV and radio spots. This just shows you how lucrative it is to sell fear..........

 

If we had a dollar for every spam we get for extended warranty, despite having purchased one right as the car turned three years old, I would probably have nearly $50. Even having moved to another state a few months ago, the spam follows change of address / registering in another state

 

Their big lie is, "...you have not contacted us to update the factory warranty...." There is no way to update or extend or do anything else to better the factory warranty. In that bottom fine print they do state that they are a 3rd party and unaffiliated with the dealer or the car maker, but who bothers to read and understand that? Sleazy, for sure. Illegal, it ought'a be.

 

Have you tried sending them to your state's attorney general? What might they say? Those creeps even get through my anti-spam call defenses about a half dozen times a week with robot calls.

 

Hell, a company like this needs to be shut down.

Lets just say someone buys into this. Do you think they actually own up to an actual warranty and pay out?

AND, to top it off, lets just say someone buys into it, do they stop with the calls and the mailers? lol

Haha, sick, very sick. Then the actual employees, thats another story.

 

I'm pretty sure they'll take your money as soon as you are willing to part with it, though today would certainly be best for them. They likely have no clue about your real warranty status, e.g. miles driven or extended warranties purchased through the dealership.

Some other operators in this fleecing industry don't even bother to look up what car(s) you have, but just send a generic notice assuming that you have a car. E.g. my spouse was receiving notices when her car was then over 20 years old. Though none now that it is over 30 years.

While deceptive, it does have sufficient disclaimers to be not clearly illegal. Most state AGs are already overwhelmed with more clearly illegal stuff than they can adequately handle, so it seems unlikely that they'll get this far down their priority list.

 

Up here there’s a rash of calls. Stuff like this:

"your Social Insurance Number has been cancelled"
"there's an illegal package waiting for you at the border"
"you owe taxes and there's an arrest warrant out for you"

And texts:

"your Nova Scotia bank account has been locked, click this link to speak to a representative"

And emails:

"Fedex attempted delivery of..."

And on and on.

Trouble is, they're relentless. They must be working, getting enough people off-guard that they keep the gift cards and bitcoin coming in.

 

I get a lot of those, too.

This is what makes it doubly annoying. People are encouraging them!!!! If it never ever worked, they'd get tired and maybe (it's a long shot) find something constructive to do.

 

4 Ways To Stop Junk Mail - Clark Howard

 

Those will stop only 'legitimate' junk, which essentially means none of the examples mentioned in this thread.

 

I had a very uncomfortable conversation with a friend once, where something I said came across as if I considered anyone, anywhere, taking a telemarketing job, as making an immoral choice. And she mentioned there had been time X in her life, needing money, she had taken a telemarketing job.

And the conversation was uncomfortable because I couldn't really take it back much. That pretty much is my opinion, it didn't just come across wrong.

My dad worked in marketing, and there were things he really wanted to make sure I understood about it. One was how the different types of marketing involve different amounts of psychological pressure and get chosen for different purposes.

If you've got a real widget that's objectively useful and better than the other guys' widgets, you can go for the minimal pressure styles of marketing. You write up clearly what it can do and its specs, and get some placements in whatever publications knowledgeable widget buyers follow. You wait for the favorable independent reviews to come in, which they will because it's objectively useful and better than the other guys', and you watch the orders roll in. There's not a whole lot more you need to do.

If your kind of widget is more a commodity, it works just fine and so do the other guys', maybe you hope you can nurture some kind of Pepsi/Coke brand identity, you need to work harder. Maybe get some comic writers to script some funny TV or radio spots where you'll throw in a catchy jingle and hire some actors who look the way your target customers wish they looked. More psychology there. Maybe you're not really pressuring customers, just trying to distract them a little from noticing that your widget is really no better or worse than the other guys'.

If you're selling unmitigated snake oil or some predatory scam, now you have to be looking at the options like telemarketing, door-to-door, free-dinner-with-90-minute-presentation, that kind of thing. Now you're trying to maneuver people into personal interactions where they'd feel bad about treating you impolitely, and you can use pressure and doubletalk to sell them on stuff that's not even remotely in their interest.

Those kinds of marketing are labor intensive; you need the boiler rooms of phone callers, the people going door to door, the conference halls and the 90 minute dinners, and you don't go to those kinds of tactics unless you're selling what no one would buy unless bamboozled and you know it. So it seems naïve at best to take a telemarketing gig to make a little dough but hope you're not going to be involved in something predatory.

I had a half-joking answer to that problem for years: anti-telemarketing boiler rooms. Hire a bunch of people to staff the phones, and run a subscription service for people who hate getting telemarketing calls. When they got one, they would forward it to your boiler room, and your staff would keep chatting with the telemarketer and sounding halfway interested for as long as possible, just to slow the telemarketers down and drive their costs up. The beauty would be that now there's a gig you can take and make some dough talking on the phone, without having to go to the dark side.

Well, about five years ago, somebody (who never met me and didn't get the idea from me) went and did it.

Only he doesn't hire people, so he doesn't have the non-morally-compromised-employment-option feature. He just built an AI to keep the bastidges on the line. And posts the funniest resulting conversations on the web.