How To Avoid Wells Fargo Collections Dept. Via Phone
I am writing this post for 3 reasons:
Wells Fargo Home Mortgage sucks and they just don’t care. Their goal, it seems, is providing bad customer service along with mortgage financing. You can read more about their bad behavior in this post and this post. After I wrote the first post, I was contacted by Wells Fargo corporate as detailed in the second post. Then, I received a letter saying basically we’re allowed to behave like this as specified in the mortgage documents you signed and we’re going to continue on like this and you’re going to like it.- In this humble little blog, the first post (above) has been a freaking magnet for disgruntled Wells Fargo Home Mortgage customers. Every week since I made that post I get at least 2 comments and they’re all bad experiences from other home owners. Any more and I may set up a separate web site for this.
- Wells Fargo Home Mortgage collections department likes to use technology to “do their job better” in the form of a badly designed call-center automation system. Well, I can also play at that game. Wells Fargo, meet Asterisk.
I wrote about Asterisk earlier in this post about how to keep tenants’ and contractors’ phone manners in check using this system but it turns out that it’s also ideally suited to dealing with this annoying company as well.
First some background; Asterisk is an open-source telephony platform that runs on Linux. Basically it’s a pretty powerful phone system that can run on an old PC. It can do everything from handle VoIP calls to provide voice mail.
Another feature it has is called “zapateller.” This feature is used to inform the call-center automation system used by Wells Fargo and telemarketers alike, that your phone line is no longer in service. It does this by playing a special tone which is recognized by these systems.
When the call-center systems hears this tone, it removes your number from its list because it’s “out of service.” I’ve gone a step further and compiled a list of caller-id numbers that get this treatment. Oh ya, and by the way, the entire city of Des Moines, Iowa gets this treatment as well. Des Moines is where Wells Fargo’s headquarters are. In fact, when calls come in from any number on this list, my phone doesn’t even ring. They get the “out of service” tone and then straight to voice mail.
At this point, if Wells Fargo wanted to talk to me, they would need to send someone to my door or send a certified letter since most anything with the Wells Fargo logo on the envelope goes straight into the round file.
