Expert: Jack Toomey - 11/22/2006

Question
Jack,  I have been receiving repeated recording phone calls from Nextel, on my business line. This has continued for about 2 days. The recording asks for person to call who has never worked for us and no knows. I called Nextel and was told,this person had given our business number as his home number. They were sorry for the inconvenience and would place an order to stop the phone calls.  I kept on receiving calls. I called Nextel back and explained to them they were calling a business, please stop calling, release our phone line. The constant interruption for our employees trying to serve customers and process credit cards are debilitating our business. Again they were sorry and said it could take up to 24 hours to 30 days to stop the calls.  This was totally unacceptable. So here I am day 3 hoping they have removed the automatic phone recording to our business. Do they have the legal right to put recorded messages on my phone line when I have asked them to remove it?  How can I stop this in the future? What are my recourses with Nextel?  Thank-you  

Answer
Kim,

   You know the same thing happened to me with a different company?  A former worker had given our office phone as his business phone and we contined to get calls for him even though we said he no longer worked with us.  But of course in a large company there is no accountability and no one bothers to note that in their computerized notes and the calls continue.  I will tell you what we did.  Obvously you cannot get a warrant for a large company and there is nothing that the police can do because one element is missing and that is criminal intent.  In other words someone has to have the intention of harrassing you before it becomes the law.

    We looked up web sites where you can register complaints and tell your long story and post it.  We posted our story on about five sites (honestly I can't remember their names but they are fairly easy to find by simply entering the word "complaint, without the quotation marks, in Google and you will get the sites.  Well after awhile the calls stopped and we got a call from someone in the customer relations department who said she was very sorry and the calls stopped.

     Depending on what state you live in you could be breaking the law by recording the incoming phone calls without the permission of the caller so I would not do that.

   So that is one thing to do.  The second is to sue Nextel in your local small claims court for the maximum amount allowed but you have to be able to prove that Nextel took away that much money from your productivity, etc.

  Let me know if any of this is not clear.