OK, What's the Scam Here?

June 30, 2015 10:38 AM

At work I've been getting 2-3 calls per week for the last few months that all follow the same pattern - someone wants to send me a free white paper about something and just needs to verify my information. They are clearly some kind of marketing ploy but I can't figure out what the purpose is.

Note: I work in IT and these are all IT-related calls.

The familiar pattern is:

* Heavily-accented caller identifies himself by a common Anglo name ("John" is pretty typical);
* Caller claims to be working for a generically-named company, like "IT Solutions" or "ITS" or "Customer Advice" (which, I suppose, serves to make them virtually un-Googleable);
* Sometimes caller claims to be calling on behalf of IBM or Dell or some other tech company;
* Caller says he wants to email me some information (sometime a "white paper") about IT business strategy, or IT solutions, or IT networks and servers (it's always generic) and just needs to confirm some information.

If I even let things get that far, the caller then rattles off my business email address and generally seems to already have all of professional information (which is freely available on the Internet anyway).

I have never agreed to receive this "information" so I don't know what they are trying to send me. When I have asked follow up questions about the company or to speak to a supervisor they generally just hang up.

It's annoying to be interrupted by these calls, but my bigger question is: What are they trying to do? They already know who I am and have my contact information. This is not like those fake head-hunting calls where they try to get you to pay a fee to apply for a job, and they don't seem to be trying to sell me something. I just don't get what could be behind these calls and I get so freakin' many of them.

My only thought is that it's an attempt to circumvent CAN SPAM and obtain my verbal permission to get added to a mailing list. But it seems like a really expensive way of going about that.

Does anyone else get these calls? Does anyone know what's really behind them?

posted by majorsteel to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

Best answer: I never answer unexpected calls to my desk phone, but I do receive several emails a week containing "the whitepaper you requested". I don't think there's any big scam here, I think big IT vendors like IBM incentivize these calls centers to get a qualified recipient for their marketing materials. They call centers already have marketing lists, the vendors don't want the reputational hit of sending something completely unsolicited.

Lately every single vendor cold call has come from my local area code as well, obviously they learned that that improves conversions.

I hate IT sales.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 10:44 AM on June 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

Best answer: They may be trying to collect and assemble more information about you and your business in order to sell it as a sales lead. The more information they get, the more valuable the sales lead is when it comes to selling.
posted by quince at 10:45 AM on June 30, 2015

I get very similar calls in a completely different industry. They usually are trying to confirm my business' address, phone number, etc for listing in a White Pages-like business directory; of course, I'm assuming there's a fee for this listing, or to obtain copies of the directory, or whatever. It's like those poetry "contests" you win where you have to buy 5 super expensive poetry anthologies with your poem in it.
posted by Juliet Banana at 10:45 AM on June 30, 2015

Sometimes caller claims to be calling on behalf of IBM or Dell or some other tech company

According to Microsoft, this kind of scam may be trying to get you to download malware onto your computer.

The FTC also has more information about phone scams.
posted by Little Dawn at 10:52 AM on June 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I used to get frequent calls at work that are similar. The caller always identifies himself as representing IBM, and does not use any other company name but IBM. They seem to already have my information. We do deal with IBM as a vendor. Nothing ever seems to come of it.

Now I don't answer my work phone (or any phone) if I don't recognize the number on caller ID. If it's important, they'll leave me a voicemail, or send me an e-mail, or contact me via the internal corporate IM system.
posted by tckma at 10:54 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I work for a company that has several lines of business that boil down (after everything else) to generation of qualified leads. So while it's possible (and perhaps likely) this is exactly as shady as it seems, I'd say it's also possible this is nothing more than legitimate, if surprisingly aggressive, lead generation. You're known to work in the target line of business, but not to have opted into marketing. Maybe a phone call would change that.
posted by fedward at 11:04 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Old scam...The more info they have on your company the easier it is to send a bill and get it past accounts payable. Remember the old copier toner scam? They wanted the serial number and page count etc. Then they would send a bill for toner. It only has to work once in a while to pay off. If you agreed, they'd probably send a big , but not too big, bill for the white paper directly to accounts payable.
posted by Gungho at 12:02 PM on June 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think it's possible they're hoping that by reaching out to you first, you'll be more likely to open potentially-shady attachments on an email they'll send you. Kind of a "here's the information you requested. attachment: document.pdf.exe" type situation.
posted by specialagentwebb at 12:06 PM on June 30, 2015

I disconnected my desk phone and let everything go to voicemail, which pops up in my email inbox. Nobody in office has noticed (or cared) so I feel it worked out great for everybody.
posted by nickggully at 12:14 PM on June 30, 2015

Best answer: I sell by phone (facilities services) and the white paper thing is common in industries where the solution could cost at least $50,000 to implement. So for the salesperson making these calls, getting you to ask for a quote is his only purpose - to get you to bring him/her to you to deal in person, where their chances go from 8-13% to 50%.

I recommend seeking them to put all offers in writing. That will stop all but the most creative salespeople.
posted by parmanparman at 12:45 PM on June 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I used to get a lot of coldcallers trying to sell us stuff, usually office products and things like coffee service; I just politely forwarded those calls to a phone in our server room where nobody ever answered when it rang or even checked the voice mail. (My personal favorite was the day some sales-jerk demanded to speak to his "brother", the company president --- two hints, sales-jerk: pronounce the name right, and check first to make sure the guy whose brother you claim to be isn't an only child.)
posted by easily confused at 12:46 PM on June 30, 2015

Although this could be a scam, it is a really well established principal of social psychology that if you can get someone to say "yes" to a small thing, the odds of getting them to say "yes" to a larger thing goes up dramatically. This would be part of the reason for what parmanparman talks about: Getting a potential customer to agree to receive the white paper makes that customer more likely to read it, thus makes them more likely to learn what the company wants them to learn about the solution they are selling, and just the act of agreeing makes it more likely they will agree to purchase said expensive services.

Furthermore, the reason it is a white paper is because they are offering you access to free research as a gift. Accepting a gift makes people feel they owe you. If you accept their free gift and it actually enhances your business performance all on its own, even without you buying anything from them, you are establishing yourself as a foremost expert in a thing they need and also making them feel indebted in a way that makes it more likely they will buy from you.

So these are really well established sales techniques that are critical to the success of certain industries where the initial cost is very high and there is just no way to sell people something small as a way to get them familiar with your company. There are good ways and bad ways to use this kind of information about social psychology to build business relationships. It sounds like it is being done in a ham-handed way.
posted by Michele in California at 1:10 PM on June 30, 2015

Best answer: They are compiling information for a database. I used to do some custom programming for a company that specialize in this sort of calls "we just need to update your info" until they closed up (probably offshore'd it)

Also keep in mind that if you do request a white paper you now legally have a "business relation" with them and thus you're no longer covered by don't-call-list.
posted by kschang at 1:23 PM on June 30, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you, everyone, for all of these insights. It seems there is an array of possibilities from legitimate (though annoying) lead generation efforts to outright scams to phishing attempts. The reason phishing didn't initially seem right to me was because of the information they already had, but I hadn't considered the social engineering aspect of it. The ol' bogus invoice scam hadn't occurred to me either, but that seems like a possibility, too.

For the record, I generally don't answer my phone anymore either, but there was a period of time when I needed to and that's when I became aware of these kinds of calls and I became sort of obsessed with trying to ferret out what was behind them. But, like I said, every time I'd start asking questions they'd hang up. So now I have some ideas and I can go back to ignoring the ringer for unrecognized numbers (and some recognized ones)!
posted by majorsteel at 1:59 PM on June 30, 2015

You'll probably laugh at me, but when I first started my job I confirmed my info with one of these callers because I was (believe it or not) interested in the topic. I got an email newsletter and unsubscribed from it eventually. I've gotten a call like this about once a year since and decline. But nothing sketchy happened.
posted by beyond_pink at 7:26 PM on June 30, 2015

If you ever fill out a free trial form for a piece of sofware with your name on it from a work computer, and your IP is from a large successful company, they will look you up and call you. It's kind of insane. I think they get your number simply by calling your company's general line and asking.
posted by miyabo at 8:37 PM on June 30, 2015