On the twelfth of October, I received a very odd phone call. When I picked up, an obviously robotic voice said:

ATTENTION: BECAUSE YOU ARE A PREFERRED WESTJET CUSTOMER YOU WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL GIFT. TO ACCEPT PRESS ONE.

Um… in the first place, I’m not a preferred WestJet customer. So far as I can remember, I’ve never been a WestJet customer at all, and in any case I haven’t flown on any planes in many years.

Second, why are they asking me to press a button to accept this gift? It sounds to me like the company behind it can’t afford enough operators to handle their calls, so they’re asking you to press something to confirm that you’re a human dumb enough to go for the vague promise of a free something, and when you do you’ll be put into a wait queue. Probably slightly better (and more legal) than “ghost calls,” where they just hang up on you without saying anything if they don’t have a free operator to talk to you when they get through — but only slightly.

I have to admire the cajones of any company willing to try that. But I don’t have to put up with it. I just hung up.

ADDENDUM: Yesterday I received another call. Same computer voice, same modus operandi, but this time saying that I’ve won 50,000 AirMiles points, and to accept I should “press 1.” I have to “accept” it? And we don’t have an AirMiles card. Nice try.

This morning I found a site where you can check and report phone numbers of scammers and the like. I looked up the number that the caller ID said they called from, and also did a Google-search of the site for similar calls from other numbers, and got nearly a hundred pages of results… apparently they’ve been at it for a while, under several phone numbers. I wonder how long they can get away with this before they’re shut down?