I Got 33 Calls in Five Days From a Maine Number About a Car I Don’t Even Own

Everyone has had it happen to them. By "it", I mean receiving a call on your cell phone from a local number that turns out to be nothing more than spam. One of the most frequent spammers in Maine is the "vehicle service department", calling to warn that your factory warranty is about to run out on your vehicle and they're here to save the day.

I'm not sure how my number got twisted up in all of this, but I've received calls from the "vehicle service department" for years on various vehicles I've owned. Typically, I ask them to remove me from their call sheet, and they do. Until they sell or transfer my number to another division of the "vehicle service department".

Starting on February 6 however, I endured a five-day stretch that I still can't believe. Starting at 8:13am on February 6, the "vehicle service department" called me 33 times over the course of five days. That included an unbearable two-hour block on February 7 in which the "vehicle service department" called me seven times from seven different numbers. All of those numbers were delivered to my phone as originating from Fort Kent, Maine. They most definitely were not.

According to the FCC, "spoofing" is the act of disguising the number or location of the call from the person receiving it. It's been the number one complaint to the FCC for the last five consecutive years. In 2022, the FCC promised to crack down on spam calls and scams like the "service warranty department", but the activation of their plans has been slow.

I ended up blocking 30 different numbers from Fort Kent, Maine, over the course of those five days. If I look past being annoyed, the most hilarious part of all of those calls was the attempt to sell me an extended warranty on a car that I sold nearly two years ago. The FTC is the official government agency that collects information on robocalls and unwanted calls made repeatedly to the same phone number. You can file a report here.