I’m no different than anyone out there in that opening up my mailbox can be stressful. There are those times you love it, when you purchased something you’ve really wanted and it comes. Then there are those when you are waiting on something you’ve wanted only to find: that particular package still hasn’t arrived and in it’s place is another offer from a credit card company to attempt to separate you from your earnings. Mind you, the CEO’s of these companies are probably the same members of billionaire think tanks who try to convince congress members that social welfare programs are a great ‘debt’ to society, and that they will increase the ‘national debt; all the while funding their campaigns and sending armies of lobbiest to their offices to convince them to impede basic consumer altruism against dynamics like nuisance correspondence………and well…….outrageous interest rates. Funny how certain ‘debt’ is permissable to them.
Reader, you don’t need multiple credit cards unless you own a business. In 2019, I started a non profit along with another gentleman in town to recruit the film industry to Northeast Alabama. That’s where they got a foot hold of my information. My non profit’s legal name was the Gadsden-Etowah Film Group. I received presorted mail from Visa and American Express numerous times, labeled assorted names not even like the legal name of my company. Names like ‘Alabama Film Office’ which is an actual entity based in Montgomery, AL. This to demonstrate they had no worries about wasting their actual customer’s money by throwing up any ‘hail mary’ they could hoping someone would finally bite. All of this after I called to get them to remove my address…….numerous times. Of course the phone call would relay to some third world country in Asia or Central America and someone would promise me it would stop in broken English I could barely understand. I guess when you stiff people on labor you can save up enough money for lobbiest and wasteful paper!
Columnist, Peter Butler of CNET has excellent advice on how to stop some of it. He recommends the following:
“A good place to start is with financial junk mail, since it’s the easiest to stop. The consumer credit reporting industry maintains its own opt-out list at OptOutPrescreen.com.
Simply provide your name and address and you can stop preapproved financial offers for either five years or permanently. (You can also opt back in to these offers if you change your mind later.)”
If you are a believer in schadenfreude my personal hack has been to find the P.O. Box address which is easily on the mail out. Take all of the paperwork and add in things like some garbage, grass and even dirt and place it in an envelope and mail it to that address. Sometimes this doesn’t work because they may have hired a third party to send out correspondence. Yet, if you are really angry about the situation, which you should be, this is a great way to feel you’ve evened the score. Please, don’t mail back anything illegal or unsanitary. This is the paper version of what I do to Robo callers out of India, who I have a handy fog horn for; ready to rupture their eardrums due to American telecom firms not behaving themselves out of greed. The good news on that front is that many states are suing these greedy, criminal robo call center cohorts.
Also, the Federal Trade Commission has started another lawsuit against an intentionally negligent ViOP provider out of Los Angeles – XCast Labs
Most importantly, voter, remind your representatives in congress, ALOT, to pass bills to stop this. You tell them, as their boss, YOU ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN WEALTHY CEO’S AND SCUZZY LOBBYIST!
Political candidate…………….you now have an excellent addition for your platform regarding social issues that need to be fixed. You get behind consumer protection it may go well in conservative states, IT WILL GO WELL IN MORE PROGRESSIVE ONES! Because, folks, there’s only so much grass and dirt I can pull up outta my yard.
-J
#creditcardjunkmail
#Alabamapolitics
#consumeradvocacy
#indianrobocallcenters
