The war on car warranty robocalls

“If you have a pulse,” and a telephone, said Newsday in an editorial, chances are you’ve been hit up by “unscrupulous salespeople” trying to sell you an extended auto warranty. Luckily, the companies made a bad call—to New York Sen. Charles Schumer’s personal cell phone, on the Senate floor. With Schumer complaining to the Federal Trade Commission, perhaps these robocallers will finally be “put on hold—permanently.”

Schumer certainly isn’t the first harassed caller to contact the FTC, said Jeff Gelles in The Philadelphia Inquirer. If you get robocalled, be wary. Some of the callers are “international scam artists trolling for identity-theft victims,” and even the companies offering service contracts are probably trying to scam you. Unless you preauthorize them, all auto-dial calls to your cell phone are illegal.

The companies have already “pissed off Verizon,” Indiana’s attorney general, and Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), said Meg Marco in The Consumerist, but it has still proved “notoriously difficult” to track down and stop these “car warranty scammers.” So maybe Schumer’s right, and it will take a national investigation give us all some peace.

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Come on Republicans, said John Gardner in New Majority, “does it really take Chuck Schumer to figure this out?” This is a hit on the pocketbooks and quality of life of millions of Americans, not to mention “legitimate marketing businesses.” And it flouts the federal Do Not Call registry, “one of the most popular reforms of the Bush Administration.”