/>iSo I was perusing YouMail’s ever popular robocall index today between phone calls and I noticed a very curious addition. There at number 5 was popular real estate market data helper company Zillow. Check it out:
| 5. | 206-539-0456 | 8,774,500 | Seattle, WA | Inteliquent | Zillow | Employee Notification |
Full list here.
Curious I reached out to my buddy Alex Quilici— CEO of YouMail–and asked him about it. Alex–who is always wondrously helpful–advised that he had seen an “insane amount [of calls] from this number” in August, 2020.
The working assumption is that these are alerts to agents notifying them of potential homes coming onto the market or potential home buyers expressing interest in services, but given the massive volume– nearly 9mm calls in one month–the volume of alerts seems exceptionally high. Alex wondered whether “something else” might be going on–like whether a scammer might have highjacked the number. But he didn’t know for sure.
Alex directed me to a site that had exemplars of messages captured from this number, and they don’t seem particularly informative. See https://directory.youmail.com/directory/phone/2065390456
I don’t have any contacts at Zillow–and their website didn’t appear to have a media relations section– but I know the loyal TCPAWorld denizens will get this article into the hands of the right person over there. And when they do: Dear Zillow– if you want to make a comment on your (apparent) prolific dialing give me a shout. I’m sincerely curious to know what all those ~9MM calls are about.
I’ll update if/when I hear from them.
Also, remember that the Robocall Index–although popularly cited carelessly by certain special interest groups–is largely agnostic on legality. As Alex has said multiple times in the past, his outfit merely tracks high volume calling, not wanted or unwanted calling and certainly not legal vs illegal calling. (But YouMail does do work with US Telecom and occasionally AGs to shut down scams.) So although Alex remains a critical player in the battle to stop bad robocalls- that doesn’t mean everyone appearing on the RI is a bad actor. Just a high volume caller.
