Lower your interest rate mortgage calls are very poorly targeted. The companies that do this get lists of people with mortgages, which is easy because mortgages need to be publicly recorded to be effective, and call all of those people without any attempt to narrow the field; or maybe they just call everyone they can. They usually call and offer "new lower rates" when the rates have gone down in the last few months, but they probably don't work very hard to estimate the original rate (it's not public record, but you could probably make a good guess based on the lender and the date it was recorded).

I had a mortgage originated in 2009, and then rate adjusted down several times to something in the 3.x range -- and would get calls and mailers promising "historically low" rates of 4.x; which I always found very amusing.

They probably offered to lower his payments.

Sure, the mortgage that would be paid off in 5 years now has another 20 years of payments left, but hey lower monthly payments!

Hello, uh, Mr. Doopler, I see that your current rate is 3.5% on your house. Did you know that at Bank Super Cool we're offering rates as high as 29.7%, and as you know, bigger is always better. PLUS if you refinance today, we're giving away FREE POPTARTS! Whaddya say, Mr. Doopler?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. They absolutely do that. If you were in person, they would even show you a great chart with their returns and the normal returns so you can see how how much better than the average they are!

Well, if they didn't call, their chance of getting a refinance sale was 0.0% Then, as now, sales is a numbers game.

Dad was very financially literate and would hang up on them after a short "no thank you". If for no other reason than they interrupted the family dinner.

Obviously in exchange they would shave off some part of it?