WhiteHat Consulting

I thought I’d write this up so others don’t have to search all over for it. I have recently switched from a Palm Treo 700P to a Motorola Droid. Verizon employees couldn’t figure out how to move my contacts from the Palm to the Droid, but I did and thought I’d share. Here’s how to do it.

You have a couple of options – either have the Verizon people do it (which didn’t work in my case), set up a GMail account and export all of your contacts there (why give Google access to all of that info?), OR you can export all of your own contacts from your Palm Desktop application into the Droid itself without the middleman. Be sure to follow these steps in the order in which they are written.

-Sync your Palm to make sure all of your contact information is up to date
-Open the Palm Desktop application
-Go to the Contacts section, click on Edit -> Select All
-Once all contacts are highlighted, click on File -> Export -> Export as VCard
-Connect the Droid to your computer
-When prompted on your Droid, select Notifications -> USB -> Mount
-Your Droid should show up as a new drive on your PC at this point
-Copy your VCard file (should end in “vcf”) that you exported to the Droid “drive”
-Unmount and then disconnect the Droid from your PC (important)
-Open Contacts on your Droid and choose Import/Export from the options on the menu
-Choose to Import from SD Card
-After importing, go to Contacts and chose Display Options from the menu
-Expand your gmail account menu and check everything that has “System Group:” by it. In my case, for example, it was “System Group: My Contacts”, “System Group: Friends”, “System Group: Family”, “System Group: Business”
-Done

The export to vCard will bring your numbers, emails, and addresses for each contact, in addition to notes you may have written about each contact. The only issue I had is that it didn’t like to import all of the pictures from the Palm so I had to edit the VCard file slightly by hand. Other than that, smooth as silk. I’ll also be posting this to my own web site along with a full review soon…

UPDATE: Just another bit of information – you can export contacts in VCard format from a variety of email applications including Outlook and Evolution. The whole process basically works the same way whether using Windows, Linux, or a Mac.

This is a bit of a rant, but some may find it quite practical. Why is this limited to just telemarketers? Debt collectors, campaigners, and non-profits need included.

For about a year I kept getting hammered by an automated call only leaving a number to call back. A Google search turned up the number belonged to a collection agency in Chicago. They were hammering stale cases and my new number from a move just happened to be one of the numbers they had. I even had it happen after I moved since my number was associated with the address of the house I USED to live in two years ago. The call was for the owner who lived there before me!

I called them and told them to put me on their DNC list. They informed me that they were exempt as they were not telemarketers. I have had the same thing happen to me many times and to friends and family as well. Here is the 411 for you:

1) They ARE exempt from all telemarketing laws. Everyone likes to bring that up on the phone, but they are actually right.

2) So what now? They are still not exempt from basic laws governing harassment. You could deal with your phone company or talk to a supervisor of the debt collection agency and threaten a lawsuit if they keep calling you, or you could just go to…

3) Deal with them under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. They MUST inform of you their mailing address and the appropriate department. Send them a typed letter explaining that you are not the person they keep asking for, you have no knowledge of this person any debts this person has. Demand that all communications to that number cease immediately or you will seek remedies under the FDCPA.

Believe it or not, this works every time under the FDCPA. The reason why is that 99.9% of the people complain on the phone where the debt collection agency is not liable. Hardly anyone ever writes a letter. Write the letter, it will stop. If it does not.. you have a $5,000 dollar insta-claim in a small claims court of your choice.

People are absolutely wrong about somebody deserving to be harassed by debt collectors. Nobody EVER deserves to be harassed under any circumstances. That is why there are large awards in civil court cases for collection agencies with too much “zeal”.

I had clearly indicated I was not the party they were looking for (do I or my name even sound like “Susan”?). Any calls that occur after this are, by definition, harassment. Now this harassment is not necessarily fully written out under the aforementioned FDCPA, but it does not have to be. This is no different than any other person or company repeatedly calling a random person after being asked to stop.

As you can see from the FDCPA, even IF the debt collection agency is calling the right person there are still rules governing their ability to call them after being asked to stop. You might want to look at:

Causing a telephone to ring or engaging any person in telephone conversation repeatedly or continuously with intent to annoy, abuse, or harass any person at the called number.

Except as provided in section 804, the placement of telephone calls without meaningful disclosure of the caller’s identity.

Furthermore, at any time a person may send a letter to the collection agency asking that all telephone communications cease. Afterwards, the collection agency may only send letters to the person updating them on any actions being taken towards the debt.

CEASING COMMUNICATION. If a consumer notifies a debt collector in writing that the consumer refuses to pay a debt or that the consumer wishes the debt collector to cease further communication with the consumer, the debt collector shall not communicate further with the consumer with respect to such debt, except– (1) to advise the consumer that the debt collector’s further efforts are being terminated; (2) to notify the consumer that the debt collector or creditor may invoke specified remedies which are ordinarily invoked by such debt collector or creditor; or (3) where applicable, to notify the consumer that the debt collector or creditor intends to invoke a specified remedy.

If all else fails, fix it yourself with Asterisk. Numbers not on the white list are dumped into recorded phone tree maze with endless loops of meaningless choices and no way out except to hang up. It would be even better with a plugin that could try and string them on for a while without actually divulging any meaningful information by responding at pauses with phrases like “that sounds interesting”, “uh-huh”, and “I’m not sure”. The goal being to waste as much of the telemarketer’s time as possible on a dead end call (i.e. no sale) before they hang up in frustration.

I happened to stroll into Walgreen’s today to pick up a prescription. Unfortunately I had to wait, but it gave me some time to think and observe. While I was sitting there, other customers went up to the counter asking for their prescription. I noticed that all they needed was a name and they were given a prescription with no ID or other proof of who you are required. Well who cares about picking up someone elses medication unless you’re some sort of junkie, right? But then another customer came up and the person behind the counter had to verify their insurance information over the phone, which is a common occurance as I saw while waiting for my prescription for 30 minutes.

So what’s the point of all of this? The information given over the phone consisted of the persons name, SSN, their insurance numbers, plan number, prescription number, address, and phone number. You could hear all of this quite clearly as the phone was right by the customer pickup window. That’s quite a bit of personal information all wrapped up into one quick visit to Walgreen’s. If you have a cell phone (most people do – it’s 2008), you can key in this information seperated by stars, periods, or whatever while just sitting there waiting for a prescription. Or you could just sit there and gather this information without waiting for a prescription. If they ask if they can help you, just state that you’re waiting for a friend – it’s not like they’ll ask you to leave if you’re sitting there quietly.

Materials: A cell phone that allows text messaging or the ability to key in a large amount of numbers and some free time.

Quite often you’ll see people with a pay-as-you-go cell phone when they feel they won’t use a cell phone enough to justify a $40+ per month payment. They work great for emergency-only purposes and to give younger kids an idea of the responsibilities involved with having a cell phone. While travelling through Wal-Mart, I happened to find a phone sitting on a shelf – a Motorola i415 Boost Mobile phone. After no luck attempting to find the owner, I decided to take the phone home with me and take a look at it as I have never played around with a phone like this before.

Luckily there was a decent charge on the phone that allowed me to write down the number of “Mom” and “Dad” to attempt to find the owner of the phone “Tennie”. However, before taking the phone back to the owner, I decided to play around a little bit. Two interesting things I found were an IP address associated with a message that was sent – 10.197.58.243. The other thing I found was that they had Yahoo! instant messenger installed and opted to save the login name and password in the phone. All one would have to do is connect and assume their online identity. Fortunately, after speaking with the owner of the phone, right after they realized they lost the phone, they called their service provider and reported the phone stolen so it couldn’t be used. This was good to hear.

The video is blurry, which probably isn’t a bad thing as it protects the information viewed on the phone from the general public. The point wasn’t to expose their personal information, but rather to explore a phone I had never played with before and do the right thing by returning it to the owner.

Materials: Motorola i415 Boost Mobile phone, Kodak Digital Camera (C743), assistance from Rebecca.