Discover Card is far to needy

For the past six weeks, I have received two to five phone calls a day from the number (614) 283-3853. On the rare occasion that I did answer, it was always a pre-recorded message from Discover Card, leaving a pre-recorded voicemail message saying “This is Discover Card. Please call us back at (800) 347-0268.”

Aside from being annoyed that I was receiving multiple calls a day, I had no reason to either answer their call or respond to their voicemail for I was not a Discover Card customer. I figured I would just ignore their telemarketing efforts and they would go away. Six weeks later, I reached my breaking point.

I had some reservations in calling them back. My first was that neither (614) 283-3853 (the number appearing on my caller ID) nor (800) 347-0268 (the number left in the voicemails) appeared on Discover Card’s website. For all I know, the persistent caller could have been someone claiming to be Discover Card but were not. Furthermore, when I conducted a reverse phone number lookup on these numbers, they were also not listed as belonging to Discover Card.

I decided to just call Discover Card directly, using the number listed on their website — (800) 347-2683. Remember, I’m not a Discover Card customer, so I had to navigate a painful automated answering service that was designed for customers to enter their card number — along with several operators — before I could finally speak with someone in their security/fraud department. I wanted to ask if Discover Card was aware of either number.

It turns out that their security/fraud department was unaware of the (614) 283-3853 number, but confirmed that (800) 347-0268 was one of theirs. I was transferred one more time to speak with the department to have my number removed. Hopefully, that will be the last that I will hear from them.

I never found out why they were so desperate to speak with me and I didn’t really care. After six weeks of persistent phone calls, there was little they could have said to win my business.