HN Explorer

Ask HN: Calls from debt collectors tied to iphone activity?

18 points by trysomething ↗ HN
I'm getting "spammed" by barclay's bank to get me to pay off ~$200 balance.

I could easily pay it, but the reason I've left this amount unpaid was to understand a bit about how their calling technology works.

A few months ago, after I forgot to pay one month, I started getting calls from different 18xx numbers. I tried blocking the #s as they came in, but would just start getting the calls from new #s.

The call frequency has increased from about 1/day to now about 12/day. Strangely, I will get these calls as soon as I've unlocked my iphone or otherwise interacted with it. Almost never do I get a call when the phone is locked and not using it.

Even more oddly, I will often be in the midst of dialing another number when they call. I am putting together statistics, but in the meanwhile if there is some app notifying the service that makes these calls, how would you investigate?

7 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread
27182818284
This is awesome. I love this.

For what it is worth, I went through a hard time with my startup. They will start using local numbers too. And then, international numbers. The methods used are actually pretty neat and clever.

digikata
I would first suspect the carrier network triggering on some increased readiness signal sent when you first unlock the phone. (e.g. on unlock, get the device on the wireless carriers data network in case the user wants some data). You might switch your sim card to an Android phone and see if you get calls when it first goes online or other similar unlock event.
jesusmichael
"predictive dialing" can be scripted now. I've seen integrations where they screen for "active" flags on twitter and facebook handles and generating calls based on that. It might be that when you unlock your phone facebook shows you as online...

Round robin outbound calling has been around for years and they dial from different numbers to try to get the best chance of getting you to answer.

pktgen
Seriously, if someone (a bank or whoever) was calling me _12 times a day_, they would never get a single penny back from me. There's a line between "trying to contact someone to find out what's going on" and harassment.
trysomething
Today's tally: 9

It crossed the line quite a while back, but I'm not particularly interested in taking a principled stand here.

I'm just curious as to how they are doing this.

ApolloRising
Do you have any app owned by them or a partner that could be providing usage data?