Jul 11, 2014
BEWARE! If you DO sit through their "burial insurance" spiel to wait to see which number you can press to get OFF their stinkin' spam list, DO NOT DO IT! I did, in this case they said "Press TWO to be removed," so I pressed TWO, and the reply you get is this: "Thank you for your interest, a REPRESENTATIVE WILL CONTACT YOU SOON!" Please trust me, I'm 100,000% sure I pressed two, so please know, these scammers have rigged it where any answer gets you.
Sooo I found out the service provider for the number is Nexgen Communications in IA, and called them. The operator was very nice and polite as I explained the situation. She asked me to repeat the number in question, and asked if I could hold please. I did, and when she came back she explained that it certainly did belong to their company -- however, it was *not* currently in service to any person or party!
The lady told me that the Spammers are using a technique called "ghosting phone numbers," meaning, the SCAMMERS are using non-working telephone numbers (probably quite a few) as a cover so that their REAL numbers will not show up on people's Caller ID, neither will *69 work. This is why when some of us tried to call back we got messages like "Invalid Number," or in my case, the message I got said "We're sorry, your call did not 'go through'; please try again later." Ugggghhhh!
I should have just stayed with the advice I learned from posters on this website: Don't say anything, and whatever you do, DO_NOT listen to their crap in hopes of getting off their calling list, because if you press ANY button for ANY reason, it's bad news -- now the crooks know your number is active; and not only will they ignore all requests to get off calling lists, they'll often give or sell your number to more crooks! From now on, I'm going back to THAT rule-of-thumb!