It’s a little before 9 pm on a Sunday night and my phone rings and it’s none other than an intrusive telemarketing call. As a charter member of the “Do Not Call” Registry, how is this possible? Well there is a little loophole for charities and sleazy telemarketers positioning themselves as charities. It turns out that charities have a monopoly on disturbing you in the evening hours which is just too tempting for some unscrupulous marketers to pass up.

Like many of the sleazeballs making calls at this hour, this telemarketing call wasn’t even human—it was a taped message that delivered their sales pitch and then gave me an 800 # to call back. On this particular call Expressed Consolidation was pitching debt relief, which doesn’t sound like a charity to me unless it is for Africa.

I looked up Expressed Consolidation on the web and here is the link I found to their site. Despite their repeated and conspicuous use of “non-profit” and “public service,” they really don’t look like what I’d call a charity. Their website also refers to people they work with as “clients,” which doesn’t sound charitable to me either.

Hoping to be able to yell at an actual human being for my late night call, I dialed their phone number (800–994–9916). The automated attendant gave me a few push-button options, one of which asked whether I was currently paying over 10% interest on my debt load. Thinking it was a trick question, I clicked “no”, the message said that they had nothing for me and hung up. If these guys only work with people paying over 10% then why didn’t they say that in the first call? (As an aside, are there really people borrowing money at interest rates over 10%?  Are they borrowing from Vinnie the Enforcer?)

Regardless, if companies who appear to me to be charities in name only keep up the barrage of calls to my home in the evening hours, then I will absolutely support closing that loophole in the law. Do not call, means exactly that!

Also, if anyone has the home phone # for  Randall L. Leshin, the executive director of the Expressed Consolidation “charity”, please let me know. I’d like to see how he likes receiving late Sunday evening calls from automated dialers. 

Even if Express Consolidation is somehow a legitimate charity, which I am dubious, we know that they are the type of organization that has no qualms about bothering hundreds if not thousands of people late at night to reach perhaps a handful of people who are appropriate for their services. That’s not charitable in my book.

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I’m emailing a link of this posting to Expressed Consolidation (at clientservices@expressco.org) to see if they have the decency to respond here since I was unsuccessful reaching a human via their 800 number. 

Additional reading: Some great tips for dealing with telemarketers.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 9:33 am by Insider and is filed under How Not To Succeed In Business, Nemesises ... Nemesi?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.