My telemarketing robot won a free Florida vacation, but has trouble claiming it.

This is a new bot named Thomas Black (formerly Tommy). He’s been in the random rotation for a while at 206-259-4999, but now he has his own number at 206-259-4995. If you are a subscriber to Jolly Roger Telephone, he can also be summoned to your mobile by texting ‘tb’ to 214-666-4321.

First of all, the scammer is trying to reach “Vicky” and the bot is male. That’s always funny.

So in this call, we have a scammer who tells us we have a vacation “on file”. This vacation is fully funded and all we have to do is claim it. And then she starts talking about all the stuff you get

• Five days and four nights in Florida
• Rental car
• Cruise
• Some kind of bonus mini-vacation
• Two additional ports of call
• Additional destinations

And she could probably keep going. I’ve heard versions where you have “two years to claim your vacation”, etc. Sometimes I wonder where the “too good to be true” warning flags kick in for most people. It breaks my heart that people fall for this. I’ve even heard that the agents don’t always know – they think they’re giving away a great vacation for a while, but once they start asking questions their bosses clam up and they end up quitting under hostile circumstances or they get fired for “performance reasons”. We don’t hear it in this call, but in others we hear the catch – there’s a “port destination fee” of $99, or $139, or something insignificant compared to this full package. Just give us your credit card…

So if you are like most of us and you’re tired of these scammers, please help me disrupt their operation by sending as many calls to the Jolly Roger Telephone Company as possible. I have lots of ways to engage with telemarketers that don’t require much effort on your part. And you’ll be surprised how satisfying it can be to hear your telemarketer waste time with these bots.

For only $6/year, you can have unlimited use of my bots by conferencing them into your calls. For a few pennies more, you can “summon” a bot to your phone by texting me. This makes it easier to add a bot because you don’t have to tell the telemarketer to wait. Details about using the bots are at http://jollyrogertelephone.com/use-a-robot/

Enjoy this call!