The way these things work is there is a company that makes the robocalls using Rachel's recording. Then if you push the button to "talk to Rachel" the call gets routed to a scammer who works for a different company or may even be independent. The company making the robocalls is paid by the scammer based on both how many calls they make, and how many calls get routed. If you hang up, the company doesn't get paid as much. If you push the button, and get routed to a scammer, the company does get paid for that connection. This use of a middleman is why it is so hard to track these scammers down. They constantly change phone numbers, probably using burner phones. If you really want to point the finger, point it at the credit card companies, who could really burn these scammers if they wanted to. More on that below.
While most all robocalls are annoying, some are legitimate, and some number spoofing is legitimate. For example, I worked for a company that called clients using robocalls to announce new programs and such. The clients could opt out. They also used robocalls for collecting past dues (they could not opt out of that, LOL). When the client pushed the button to talk to someone, the call was transferred to a collector at our location. The call looked like it came from our incoming 800 number, even though we didn't actually make the call.
The company making the calls for us had a web site where we just uploaded the list of numbers and set the parameters of the call - the recording we wanted to go out, when to call, how many times to retry, timing between calls so that our line didn't get overwhelmed, what number to transfer the call to if they pushed the right button, etc. Part of my department's responsibility (I was IT Director) was pulling the calls lists from the databases and making them available to the people who set up the robocalls.
We also had a voice-over-ip phone system and we could make outgoing calls look like they were coming from any phone number we wanted to. We had twenty something lines, all with different numbers, but we wanted the call to look like it came from our incoming 800 number - a legitimate use of spoofing.
Back to the credit card companies...
Have you ever asked yourself WHY if these pre-approval letters are how identity thieves are able to easily open credit cards in other people's names, do the credit card companies still send them out? They could shut that whole thing down in a second if they wanted to.
Must be because they DON'T want to???
