Earlier this year, I wrote about getting repeated hang-up telephone calls from an outfit called Midland Credit Management or MCM. You can read the MCM story on that post, but the short version is that MCM is a spam farm which is responsible for a surprisingly large percentage of the nuisance phone activity that flows from India into the U.S. They were supposed to pay me a settlement from a previous batch of illegal robocalls, but never did (despite it being a trivial amount). Meanwhile, they have audaciously lobbied the Supreme Court to re-interpret the law to permit their pernicious activities.
While most of my recent posts have been light-hearted commentary and satire about things like popular music, that is unfortunately not the content that most people want to see here. My website’s Google dashboard shows a huge uptick this week in searches for phrases like “mcm phone spam” and “mcm caller id”, and also many searches for another notorious phone spammer I wrote about last year (“receivables performance management”). The obnoxious robocallers must be stepping things up for the holidays, so I will follow up my previous Midland Credit Management post with the story of their most recent call to me:
I was walking at a park a few months ago when my phone rang with a call from 800-358-4172. I suspected another hang-up from MCM, and I decided to answer it so I could add it to the evidence file in case a lawsuit was needed. But this time I was surprised. After an eon of complete silence, and me saying “Hello…” numerous times into the predictive dialer void, a human voice eventually appeared on the line! It was a woman with a thick Indian accent. She asked to speak to “Jemal”. Now, I have had the same phone number for decades and it has never been assigned to anyone else. But there is a man named Jemal who lives in my town, and MCM is apparently robocalling his contacts repeatedly in an effort to shame him into paying a debt that he probably doesn’t even legally owe. (I have never even met Jemal, but one of his neighbors is a casual acquaintance who I talk to occasionally. It’s bizarre and disturbing that MCM was able to connect me with Jemal on this basis.)
By this time I had enough ammunition against MCM that I was able to play a variation of their own twisted game. Here’s a rough transcript of how this call went:
Spammer: Hello, may I speak to Jemal?
Me: May I ask who’s calling?
Spammer: This is MCM. We are calling for Jemal.
Me: MCM? That’s Midland Credit Management, right? I have an open account with you.
Spammer: First I need to verify that this is Jemal. J-E-M-A-L.
Me: Well you’ve been calling me all the time and hanging up the phone, can we resolve this matter now so that this doesn’t keep happening? My records show that I have an open account with Midland Credit Management for $23.49.
Spammer: Yes, this is Midland Credit Management, but I want to talk to Jemal.
[Translation: I want you to know that Jemal is a deadbeat, but I’m not allowed to say that directly. Instead, I have to hint at it until you track Jemal down yourself and demand that he pay our phony bill so that you stop getting garbage calls from random phone numbers.]
Me: You were supposed to pay me $23.49 for illegally making autodialed calls to my cell phone, which is coincidentally the same thing that you’re doing again today. With interest, it’s up to $41.62 now. How would you like to pay this?
Spammer: I do not know anything about that, sir. I want to talk to Jemal.
[Now I realize that she must not be permitted to hang up the phone after starting a conversation, probably because of one of the legal injunctions against this company for all of its previous FDCPA violations. This is a good opportunity to waste MCM’s time while I enjoy my walk.]
Me: Let me get my account number. Hang on a second. [I read my 12-digit TCPA class action claim number from a Post-It note that I had been keeping in my wallet for this occasion.] I’d prefer a cashier’s check if possible, because I see that you guys have been sued thousands of times so your credit is a little sketchy.
Spammer: I do not know anything about check, sir.
Me: Are you unable to pay this bill right now? May I put you on a payment plan that meets your budget?
Spammer: Sir, I cannot help you with this. Please, do you know Jemal?
Me: So you don’t want to pay the money that you owe? You shouldn’t be hounding Jemal about his bills if you aren’t paying your own bills.
Spammer: Please, sir, please, I do not know about this.
Me: If you don’t know about your account with me then why did you call me five times in a week?
Spammer: I am calling about Jemal.
Me: You haven’t even paid the bill for your last batch of spam robocalls, and now you’re running up another bill. Am I supposed to allow this?
Spammer: I will mark it as wrong number, sir.
Me: That’s what your co-worker Ethan told me last time, and then you started calling me again. I need you to add my number to your do-not-call list. [“Ethan” was the fake name used by an Indian call center agent on a previous junk call from MCM.]
Spammer: I am very sorry sir, I will mark as wrong number.
Me: That’s not what I asked you to do. I need you to permanently add my number to your do-not-call list.
Spammer: I will mark as wrong number.
[The spammer clearly had a limited English vocabulary, so I decide to let her gracefully end the conversation.]
MCM’s spam calls have stopped since this call, so this must be the trick: use enough of their own debt collection verbiage against them that they have no interest in talking to you. Of course, that assumes that you can actually get someone on the line – most of the time they hang up without saying anything. And I’ve had them stop calling for a while before, only to have them pop up again later.
Overall, the lesson from Midland Credit Management and others in its industry is that some people get to play by their own set of rules that is far more lenient than those governing the rest of us. If a small businessman opens a bar or a motel that continually annoys its neighbors and attracts a lot of police activity, his business will be declared a public nuisance and will be shut down. He will probably not be given a license to open another one. Why can’t we apply the same standard to a company that has faced multiple major law enforcement actions and thousands of lawsuits, and is responsible for tens of millions of dollars in consumer losses and hundreds of millions of spam robocalls?
Have you had similar issues with phone spam from Midland Credit Management? Add a comment here, or better yet just sue them. It’s what I’ll be doing if they start the harassment again.