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U.S. National Do-Not-Call Registry On the Way?
WinkyN writes "Yay! The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a measure that creates a national "do not call" list for telemarketers. Telemarketers are required to check the list every three months and can be fined up to $11,000 each time they violate the law. Now I won't have to ignore my telephone when it rings since more than 50 percent of my calls are from telemarketers." Congress is just getting around to passing a budget bill to run the government for fiscal year 2003 (started last October), and we're now in the time period when everything and the kitchen sink gets thrown into it just before it passes. Good to know that there's at least one useful piece of legislation.
Here in Indiana, the Do Not Call List has been a major success. I'm tempted to say it's the single most effective piece of legislation I've seen come along in quite a while. The problem with this being done at the federal level is the amount of lobbying that will take place for special exemptions (political campaigns, charities, etc.). Hopefully these will be kept to an absolute minimum, but in Washington, I wouldn't count on it!
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and can be fined up to $11,000 each time they violate the law.
now, this law would be really impressive if we, the 'victims', get a cut of that 11 grand...
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I'm on the state list in NY. So are my parents. We both get a new kind of call. A lovely British-accented woman's voice, or jerky man's voice computer message is left, daily. "This is NOT a sales call. We have an urget matter to speak to you about..." blah blah, "Please call us at 1-800-...." 'SO THAT WE CAN MAKE A FREAKING SALES PITCH' is the part they don't add.
A federal level law has not even been passed yet and already the tele-crapers have a way around it. This method was started, I believe, by collection agencies but has been picked up by the marketeers. (I am yelling at one of them as I type this!)
I've responded to EVERY telemarketer for the past 2 years with "add me to your do not call list". I've added myself to the MN statewide do not call list. I STILL get 4-5 telemarketing calls a week. They've just changed their tactics a bit to get through the loopholes in the MN law. Now, if they don't actually intend to complete the sale on the phone, they can get away with it. So, instead of being asked to sign up with a mortgage or buy siding on the phone, they just want me to set up an appointment with a friendly sales representative to discuss the matter in person.
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So, what's the U.S. Government going to do when all your telemarketing calls start coming in from China?
You know, like all the spam.
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It's a little scary entering your SSN into a computerized database, but I figured these guys already have a lot more on me, so I went ahead and did it. Hope it works.
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my home phone rings several times a day. I use my cell phone exclusivly and have never given out my home phone number. I only have a home phone for my Tivo and for quick outgoing calls if my cell is dead. Every call that comes through is a telemarketer and it's not like my number is a hot ticket as I have completely stop answering it.
100% of my 3-5 phone calls a day are telemarketers.
regional or not, that is unreasonable.
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Sounds familiar. I'm a Pac Bell customer in Southern CA. Two years ago a similar plague of automated calls started filling my answering machine memory with messages that were nothing but sequences of beeps, each lasting more than 3 minutes. Every day, a dozen or more times a day, these calls arrived exactly every seven minutes apart, with caller ID giving an "UNAVAILABLE" origin. It rendered my answering machine useless, and I was in the middle of an employment search!
I finally got fed up and called my local PD, who set up a trap and trace with Pac Bell. Although it successfully identified the caller, the PD wouldn't identify them for me - something about potential for retaliation. The detective promised me that he sent the caller a warning, but since they were out of state there was little I could do. The calls continued. Month after month.
Every month I set up another trap and trace, and eventually told the PD that I wanted recourse to civil court, and that I required the ID of the offensive caller in order to file suit. At this point the PD got the FBI involved, and finally, after more than a year, I got a call from a detective and found out the story:
The calls were originating from Dallas. The caller was a SBC Long Distance telemarketer using an autodialer. That's right, SBC.
My own phone company was jamming my answering machine with dozens of nuisance calls a day!
Why it just beeped, no one could explain. My theory is that it was my 1970's era Radio Shack answering machine with a continuous loop outgoing message cassette. The beep is a metal splice strip. The beep tone must have triggered something in the autodialer. Anyway, the FBI got results. The calls stopped. They briefly resumed again, but this time there was an 800 number on my caller ID. I called it and it was SBC LD customer service. They denied calling me at all, but I spoke to a supervisor and made it clear that I did not want them calling me at all and if they did, they would be subject to fine and criminal prosecution for harassment, due to the frequency and duration of their PITA calls.
I finally got peace.
To this day I am still confounded by the irony - it was SBC, my own phone company. And I can't sit thru a SBC long distance ad on television without shuddering in revulsion.
I can see the fnords!
This may already be posted above, but since I don't have time to read through I'll go ahead and post it anyhow:
I've heard for some time while they've been drumming up support for this bill that there's one big downside to it. As the article says, the bill permits non-profit calls, but what it doesn't say is that this bill will preempt any state laws that are more restrictive. So, for example, people in Indiana (which already has a very good do-not-call-list law) will get MORE calls under this bill since there is a wader range of calls permitted even when you are on the list.