Slashdot Mirror
Telemarketers Plan Counterattack
Chris Hoofnagle writes "CNN reports that companies who heavily use telemarketing are planning to counterattack consumers with a barrage of spam and junk mail in October, when the new do-not-call registry goes into effect. Slashdotters should be aware that, as well as anti-spam email software, there are tools to avoid junk snail-mail, such as Junkbusters' free Declare, Private Citizen's excellent service and the Postal Service's Prohibitory Order service, which is described at the EPIC privacy page."
"We'll be giving the dog what the dog wants to eat," James F. Lyons, president of direct-marketing consultancy Optima Direct told the paper.
...Raah.,
The paper said that in addition to seeing more e-mail or junk mail, consumers who call companies on other business may now have to listen to sales pitches while negotiating voice mail messages.
Yeah, that's what I wanna hear- I'm a dog, and I get to listen to kibbles and bits and bits and bits next time I call to get my dog neutered. Tell ya what boys, you pull a voice spam on me while I try to give you business and I'll just be letting my dog hose down whatever he feels like instead. As I close my CNN Money Pop up. I fell for something pretty bad tonight too- got my first land line in three years (cell only since) and it rang for the first time tonight. I hadnt given the number to anyone. I picked it up... listened for about 10 seconds of silence. I go, "hello?" CLICK. Looks like another fake hotmail address for the Do Not Call registry. Crimony. Doesn't it just make you livid? Gah.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Those sleazebags will simply move to Canada, where there is already an overabundance of call centers and phone scammers.
It's a lot harder to have a throw-away phone number than an email address. Thank you Hotmail!
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Stop buying stuff from the companies that do this. Bottom line. Spam and telemarketing works because of idiots. No one will pay cold callers who can't sell 1 out of 1000 sales. Put an end to the insanity, slashdot.
"We'll be giving the dog what the dog wants to eat," James F. Lyons, president of direct-marketing consultancy Optima Direct told the paper.
I usually flush shit down the toilet, not feed it to my dog. What goes around, comes around. I predict there will be a backlash against the sleaziest of these direct marketing firms and the slime that hire them. I already refuse to deal with companies that make me play touch-tone tag on their badly designed voice systems.
I hope I live long enough to see the day when all advertising is banned. All commercial speech. Banned. Then after that comes banning of all speech. Let's just give up all rights just because of some annoying companies. Well I hope most people realize that to them we are nothing more than consumers. We live in a consumer society and they want to shove their junk down our throats so they can get rich. The real question is when will we as citizens and people realize how this consumerism is destroying or society and cultures and stop putting up with it. Believe me it will be better if people did it instead of "big brother"
Advertising keeps Slashdot free. It keeps TV free, it keeps the radio free. Admittedly, the last two I can live without, but you'll have to pay a LOT more to access all of your favorite web sites if commercial speech is banned. Not to mention that advertising sells whatever product YOU are working on. What happens when your product doesn't sell 'cause nobody's heard of it? And don't tell me it can get by just on word of mouth.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
The tragedy being that after eliminating all legitimate email, that method may still leave you receiving spam.
One sleazy spammer tactic is to target a domain and autogenerate a zillion possible email addresses, in what's called a Rumpelstiltskin attack. If you have an email alias common or simple enough that you couldn't use it as a password, then it's vulnerable. If it's on some high-profile provider like Hotmail, it will be attacked.
From the article:
Rough translation: "we will advertise at you by any and all legal means available, no matter how annoying we have to be." I do sometimes wonder if there isn't a viable place for, "just concentrate on giving the customer good service," in this world. Nobody seems to believe in that quaint old idea anymore.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Don't think so? I'll show you the receipt for the money I send to the phone company to rent the number. As such, calling me to sell me something is nothing short of trespassing--it is using my property without my permission.
Howizzit telemarketers don't grasp this concept? Howizzit the lawmakers fail to? Whyizzit we have to finely craft laws such as the don't-call-list to leave loopholes so I still have to hang up on the statetroopers whoopee fund. It is so demonstrably clear that my phone number is mine and using it is not free speech. Leaving the loophole is like leaving a loophole that says it is okay for the local repugnican party to put "elect tusch" signs in my yard.
And same argument goes for my email address. It's mine, I pay good money to my cable company to have it.
Oddly, snail mail doesn't trespass in the same way. The marketer has to pay to for their soon-to-be-trash to be brought to my house. Then again, I do have to pay to have it hauled away.
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
I think the front of the Wall Steet Journal today had a graphic on the right side of the front page showing the amount of money spent by industries on telemarketing.
If I remember correctly, the bar graphs summed up to something around $10 billion (yes, $10,000,000,000) dollars anually.
So, if $10 billion is being spent on telemarketing, how much are people buying to make that expenditure worth while?
Somewhere, oh somewhere, there are those idiots spending ATLEAST $10 fucking-billion dollars a year to keep these dickheads calling us at dinnertime!
If they give you a postage-paid envelope (and a lot of them do), mail it back to them. Make 'em pay postage both ways.
Just make sure it doesn't have your name on it. Duh.
>The real question is when will we as citizens and people realize how this consumerism is destroying or society and cultures and stop putting up with it.
When we decide we want to live in caves again?
Without people selling you stuff, you'd only have available to you what your skills can produce. Can you build good furniture? Can you build a stereo? Can you build a phone? Can you build (as in, from the transistors up) a computer? A fan? A heater? Hell, with your current skills can you even be sure that you'd have running water?
Giving up consumerism means every man must learn everything. If it takes 7 years to get a PhD in something, and a year to become expert at building it, the average man will only accomplish 8 things in their lifetime (well, actually about 3 unless you learn to operate on yourself).
And, before I hear we could become communists/socialists, consider this: ANY time you take ANYTHING from someone else, in exchange for anything (in the case of communism, in exchange for your labour, indirectly), you are consuming (in the economic sense).
Now, that all being said, people selling you stuff doesn't ALWAYS mean people advertising to you. It's just a byproduct of the process, and it's your job to decide where the limit is with your wallet.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Perhpas we'll need a "do not mail, and do not e-mail" list now as well.
You do realize, right, that this is a very bad idea? I mean, how many valid e-mail addresses would you get by harvesting this list? When's the last time you saw a spammer who cared about the rules (or the law)?
Their model doesn't rely on them annoying their customers...their customers are the businesses who hire them, not the people who purchase things from them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
They don't seem to understand that we don't want their stuff. It doesn't matter how loud they shot, how annoying they are, or how many times they try to deliver their message--we aren't going to buy their products.
Not at all.
1.) Welcome to capitalism.
2.) Actually, the real hypocrisy would be to support a company's bad practice, simply because of who that company is. (Sort of like complaining about anything Microsoft does, just because you don't like them...so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this subtle point is lost on the Slashdot readership.)
3.) When a company does something I like (good magazine), I will support them (buy it). When a company does something I dislike (BRM), I will object (mail them). There's no inconsistency, whatsoever.
Why would there be any question that the email would be spam? OF COURSE IT'S SPAM. If it's bulk and unsolicited, it's spam. Just because it's mainsleeze doesn't mean it's not spam. If Allstate sends unsolicited bulk email, they are just as guily as spamming as the asshat the sends you Make Penis Fast schemes. Don't ever get fooled into believing that "legitimate email marketing" is not a complete oxymoron. 99 times out of 100, when someone says "email marketing" they mean spam. The only bulk email advertising that's not spam is verified, closed-loop, confirmed opt-in mailing lists.
I have considered this, and I still have to wonder what good a database of telephone numbers would do for the federal government. Political campaigns are already exempt from the DNC list, so it can't be much of an advantage for the politicos. So would somebody please kindly explain to me how the phone number database generated by the DNC list is going to lead to an Orwellian future where we all have our SSNs tattooed on our asses or something, as the parent infers? Thanks.
If this was really true, it would have stopped already.
-- james
The people spoke amongst themselves and the City Council and it came to be that the zoo would no longer be free. We would have ticket counters and an admission fee. We knew the troublemakers would go somewhere else if they had to pay to get in, and if they were caught misbehaving, they would have to pay again if they wanted back in. It worked. We hated to lose our "free" zoo, but it had to be.
I hate to think of internet mail-server routing services no longer being free, but we may well get pushed into this because it may be less expensive to deal with a payment system than it is to deal with spam.
At least one advantage I can think off right off the bat with a payment system is that someone pays... that means someone is accountable for what got sent, and if fraud is involved, there is a direct monetary theft involved. A shopping mall can haul you into court over a shoplifted candy bar. So even if the payment is not much, it *is* a payment and incurs accountability.
It really bugs me to be forced into this train of thought, as I would much rather consider infrastructures to be public property. But, like the zoo, a pricing strategy may have advantages for controlling unruly pests.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
If there was a proper law that explicitly made it illegal for MakeMoneyFast.com to send UCE, and also provided penalties for companies (or their agents) who hire spammers to advertise on their behalf, then the business of spam for hire would suffer.
Plus, how hard is it for professional spammers to find valid email addresses? Since email is a communications application your email address has to be public to some degree in order to be useful. Even if you control access to your email address it can be leaked by anyone you ever communicated with. I get plenty of spam that I know was generated as a result of communication with customers or vendors - some unethical person (maybe even the postmaster) at one of those sites sold the list of addresses.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
This is called the "White Pages." It's how you get in contact with people.
It doesn't exist yet because the DNC list doesn't go into effect for 3 more months! It would be kind of silly to have a complaint center that receives complaints about things that aren't yet illegal.
Currently, under the telecommunications privacy act, you must pursue legal action against law-breaking telemarketers in small claims court, and with all of that information (and more!)
Ah yes, the infamous Nuremberg defense. Historically it has a poor success rate, you might want to switch to the Chewbacca defense - I hear that works.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
That's great, seriously. It is nice to know that there is a market for people in the telemarketing business so that they don't all lose their jobs. I do believe, however, that the enormous early adoption of the federal do-not-call list appears to be early evidence that this market is much smaller than many in the direct marketing industry would like to admit.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
And I can understand why they're switching to spam and direct mail. They've convinced themselves that there are people who want to buy things, and you'd be suprised how easy it is to get people to buy from you, or at least listen to you. There are a lot of idiots out there. I quit because I couldn't stand to be part of that industry. (When I started I really, really needed the money, and I couldn't find another job that fit into my schedule.) Not only do you do something that could get you killed, but the management at these places treat the workers like slaves; scheduled bathroom breaks, no food or drinks or reading materials at the cubicles, tied to the phone for eight hours a day, denied promotions that would take you off of the phones, and forced to be as annoying as possible because there was always someone listening. The management in this industry are the ones to blame, most of the telemarketers there were college kids or single moms trying to make a buck and getting dicked around if they did well. The DNC list is the best thing to happen to this industry, but, like the scum they are, they're fighting the rights of people not to be swindled or bothered. When I was there they told us that the main office, which we give the address and phone number of, is built like a fortress, so don't try to go postal on them, it won't work.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.