Dennis sent me the info (company name, city, local phone number, & toll free number), and I had a little fun pulling the few threads I could find... but ultimately did not find very much.
Posting it here as a PSA:
- There is a real "company" with the same name, which is a UPS/DHL/FedEx like company out of a northern state but only services a few states near that area. None of the branches use these two phone numbers provided, as far as I can identify. That "company" does not operate in Texas.
- There does not appear to be a company with the same name located in the city in Texas they claim to be from.
- The name of the company is similar enough to so many names, that when searching for it, many very legitimate companies are shown in google, giving an air of credibility at a 10-15 second glance (the max amount of time most people seem to spend looking while on the phone with a unknown caller before making a decision about how to respond).
- The "company" (and companies like them) do not do "certified mail", that is a USPS trademarked name, no other provider can legitimately use it without permission. Also if the "company" was sending documents via a trackable method, they would not know the contents any more than UPS/Fedex/USPS would.
- As of a few years ago (2016), the "company's" local phone number was owned by ------ - ------ (who would now be a 79 year old woman) who operated "a redacted-name HVAC company" out of her home at [Specific Address in different city in Texas]. This company is now closed, and no longer in business (at least out of the different city). The carrier that operates the phone number resells service to many smaller B2B Landline & VOIP services. There is no public record of who owns that number now.
- There appears to be no public record of who owns the toll free phone number. It looks scrubbed. Even the history of who owned this number in the past is "unknown".
- I have a note in my personal file from well over a year ago, where a family member was contacted by a "company with almost the exact same name" from the same city about a legal matter, but no note of the phone number they used. I do have a note that I concluded that it was a scammer & told them to ignore/block.
I feel it is pretty obvious that they are scammers. Any company, even a tiny one, would want their contact information to be online for people to contact them if they were legitimate. It really looks like these scammers are slick enough to spend the time to try to scrub the numbers they use off of the net (and pick numbers that are not already in the databases), so that when someone quickly searches the phone number when they are called it does not bring up "this is a scammer" on page 1 of google.
I bet their tactic/work enables a much higher rate of successfully taking people's money/information.