I have gotten calls re my DGD's ex's sister! I don't know her, have never met or even seen her. She lives in California; I have never been in California; as far as I know she has never been in Virginia. I recognized the name and asked my DGD about it and she said it would have been a collection agency because the girl has been in $$trouble for a long time. She has a first name that could be male or female. When the caller asked if I knew HIS address, I knew they didn't even know who they were looking for. I would love to know how they got my number. CR, I hope you don't get any more calls. Hope I don't either. Sue

It's the GOVERNMENT, people-- the government BUREAUCRACY. You're not really supposed to be able to decipher it! Just think about when you filed your tax forms this year--how long did it take you to understand some of the new rules? (And I'm not talking to the people who took it to H&R Block). Really, some of you are acting ridiculous. What do you think "verify" means? Have you never had to verify your name and address when contacting a utility company or your credit card company? You've all been reading too many scare stories about identity theft. Nobody is going to steal your identity and open up 100 credit-card accounts on the basic info that the census people are supposed to ask you. And if you should happen to get that caller who is really a scam artist and asks you for your bank account number, then you hang up. But just do your civic duty--help the census work! Help tell the government where they need to put funding for your state! I don't get some of you: You filled out a form and perhaps talked to someone at the front door, but you won't take 10 minutes to complete the process? And, from Lowspark's example, these are the questions that make you think it's some con man, or that this is so intrusive and a waste of your valuable 10 or 20 minutes? Really, I think the Oprah show and even this chat board can wait a few minutes. This sort of questioning is suspicious? Did you fill out the form correctly? What is your name? Did you fill out the form? What is your address? My god! I can go to the reverse-directory at my library and get this info in 10 seconds! And anybody wanting to plan to burglarize your home and wondering if you live alone can just sit on your block for a couple of hours and figure that out. Are you also peeking out your curtains to make sure this isn't happening? There are some bad apples in every bunch, but pls, use your intellect. (And when you take a trip on a plane, when the check-in clerk asks you if you packed your bag yourself, does that make you feel as if they've intruded on your privacy?) The gov't has already spent a ton of money on this. It's not going to spend more to send some other kind of form to guide you through this last step. There is a lot of official census bureau info you could check, if you can spare that 10 minutes to do the research. You've crossed the line from cautious to paranoid. Not everybody is out to get you. This posting makes me livid.

They do that all the time here in Oz. Don't engage with them, just hang up. They claim to be calling on behalf of Microsoft to fix a potential problem with your computer. If you follow their instructions you may end up giving them remote access to your computer at worst and ending up with thousands of viruses (one of DH's customers had over 2,000 viruses!) at best. Then they charge you $200 for the insult.

So sorry to hear about your father, but nice that you got a final phone call. I can see how that would be comforting. When I lived in Culver City (1989-1994) I had a land line with a phone number that had previously belonged to Larry Welk III, a helicopter pilot for channel 9 news. At this time I mostly used the name Larry instead of Lars because Larry is what my family called me, and that is the name that I identified myself by on my answering machine, which had cassette tapes back then. At one point I started to get a lot of phone calls from companies that wanted to sell me insurance for my helicopter, and this would take up a lot of space on the cassette tapes, which I could not fast forward through at that time. Therefore I changed my outgoing message to say, "Hello, you have reached 310 377-8855, the house of NO LAWRENCE WELK music. If you think you have reached this number in error, take two Geritol and dial again in the morning." The calls from the insurance companies stopped after that. However, when my mother heard this message, it made her mad, and she made me change it because she was a Lawrence Welk fan.