http://www.ComputerBob.com/guides/why_i_dont_like_park_dansan.php .
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by ComputerBob
November 18, 2007
Two days ago, I received a disturbing telephone call. Notice that I said "I received" that call. I just want to make sure you understand that I was at home at the time and I personally answered the call myself — it was not answered by my telephone answering machine. When I said, "Hello," an urgent-sounding recorded voice told me "Do not hang up. This is not a telemarketing call. This message concerns important financial dealings that you have with our company, Park Dansan." It then instructed me to call Park Dansan at 1-800-378-3207 as soon as possible, with an eight-digit reference number, to settle the matter. Then it repeated the 800 number and the reference number a couple of times, to give me time to write them down, and it reminded me again that I had important financial dealings with Park Dansan.
I usually hang up on that type of call, and I didn't even recognize the company's name, Park Dansan, but in this case, the recorded message sounded very urgent and more than a little frightening. And since my telephone numbers have been listed in the U.S. National Do Not Call Registry for the past four years, I knew that Park Dansan was probably not a telemarketer. So, since I currently have a few financial and medical "irons in the fire," I decided to call, to make sure that everything was all right. I was automatically put on hold and forced to listen to sappy music for ten minutes. When a human being finally came on the line, I asked her to spell the name of her company so that I could write it down. Then I asked her why Park Dansan had wanted me to call them long-distance and listen to sappy music for ten minutes. She told me that she needed my reference number in order to look up the reason that they had contacted me. After putting me on hold for a few seconds to look up my reference number, she came back on the line and told me that they are trying to reach someone named "Elizabeth Belson" at my telephone number. I told her that I've had this telephone number for at least three years, and that there is no one by that name at this telephone number. She told me that she'd remove my phone number from their list. I sure hope she wasn't lying about doing that, but I suspect that she was, since she never even apologized for the fact that her company had harassed me without any reason.
I don't know whether or not it's legal for Park Dansan to make deceptive automated calls to strangers, telling them to call Park Dansan back, but it certainly is an extremely annoying, rudely presumptuous, unnecessarily frightening and personally intrusive way for a company to do business, especially when they call someone like me by mistake. If a human being from Park Dansan had called me, I would have been happy to tell them that there is no Elizabeth Belson at my telephone number, but instead, they used an automated recording to deceive me into wasting my time to call them to correct their customer records for them. And how many hundreds or thousands of other people has Park Dansan called with that same deceptive recorded message? It seems fair to me that Park Dansan should be required by law to pay me for my time, the same way they would have had to pay one of their own employees if they had bothered to have a real employee call me. I just wanted to let you know about that experience, in case you ever get a similar call from Park Dansan. Or in case you're in a position in which you can do something to stop Park Dansan from doing to other folks what they did to me.