Harassing Phone Calls from Dallas 3

Although I cannot condone the practice of cursing, a dandy one for spammers and those who hijack websites and forums came to mind today: "May the static discharge of a thousand dry woolen socks infest their motherboards!"

Some good has come of this colossal waste of time and effort: I've taken a good look at this family's credit card history, and re-acquainted myself with our credit card company's online information service. An email to a family member regarding a non-existent eBay purchase. Under the circumstances, I decided to do a credit check. We're okay, thankfully.

A new wrinkle: we got two bright yellow-and-red packages from DHL, a Florida shipping company I'd never heard of. The DHL address on the shipping labels was (from the point of view of someone who grew up on the edge of North Dakota) close to the "escort" services that share a number with whoever kept our phone ringing over the weekend.

And the sender was identified as "The Alliance." The same name that came up over the weekend.

I waited to open the packages until a police officer was present. On the remote chance that there was something of an extralegal nature inside, I wanted an outside witness to see that we hadn't broken the seals.

Someone had seen to it that we got about a hundred of those cardboard shipping envelopes, along with enough forms and laminating material to use each one, with some left over.

Judging from what's happened to date, my guess is that whatever person or persons is behind this is immature, malicious, and has entirely too much leisure time.

DHL has their material back now, following a cordial chat with someone at the office back in Florida. (If I need to ship something, I'm going to keep DHL in mind. Those yellow-and-red packages and envelopes are the most eye-catching containers I've seen in a long time.)

I had hoped that the unwanted calls had ended, but we got another today. I'm assuming it's the same outfit, since the tinny music was of the same execrable quality as we'd heard before.

At least now we know what to look for. I think that, with a little learning at this end, we can demote this annoyance to "trivial."