Saturday, September 18, 2004

Prank Calls & the Law:

Who would have known that trying to market your own prank phone call CD would require so much legal knowledge?

BTW: The guy that I link to is quite good; I have all 4 of his CDs. He has a quite novel idea: Incoming prank calls. He pranks people who call him, instead of him making outside calls. Now you may say, that doesn’t sound that original. But here’s the way he does it: He gets 800 #s that are like one number off from those of other firms, some of them quite big (he received such a high number of UPS’s calls that he ended up in a legal dispute with them. Check out this letter that was sent to him by UPS’s lawyers). People misdial & think they are getting say UPS, and he plays along. He then, using a variety of killer voices, treats them with unmerciful rudeness. And they tend to act how you would expect someone to act if you had just called customer service from a reputable firm and talked to some rude asshole.

When I first heard his recordings, I thought that he had found some way to intercept calls to businesses or maybe that he moved in and out working as real customer service for a variety of these businesses for the sole purpose of getting to make these CDs. UPS too thought that he had some method of illegally diverting their calls. Nope. Just similar 800#s and careless fingers when dialing (makes for one funny recipe!).