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."
because this will vastly improve the popularity of their products, putting them in the company of Nigerian scams and penis enlargement systems. Very popular indeed.
They want to play dirty??
They better have some heavy duty security in place. And they better have armed escorts to and from the parking lots. Someone is going to get a belly full someday very soon and they will go looking for a pound of flesh..
The odds are against them because they so viscously and relentlessly hound and harrass such large numbers of people so endlessly.
Sooner or later, the numbers say that a certain percentage of their victims will snap..
And you know what? I won't shed a single tear for one of them. Not one....
I can understand the logic behind a company who's business model relies on calling customers switching to spam and direct mail when the DNC registry is implemented but why can they not see that the reason it is being put in place is because of them and if they persist they will merely succeed in getting do not spam and do not mail lists created.
If your business model requires hassling your customers then when they prevent you doing it via the phone it's time to change business models not the method you use to hassle.
It's self defeating and why business's think that customers want you to cold-contact them I do not know. Find a market, advertise on mass media or in media that your customers read and then sell to them. Don't bother everyone else with your crap.
I am a bomb technician, if you see me running - try to keep up.
Telemarketers and spammers alike don't deserve respect.
If you get mail, try to always reply... on their dime. E.g. when they have business reply stuff.
Otherwise, if there is a return address mark "dead" on the mail and send it back.
If you're getting calls always try to find out things about the caller. Ask where they go to school [most are students]. Ask what political party they voted for, etc.
The bottom line is instead of trying to run and hide from them why not have fun instead? Answer the phone, just don't give them useful information. Lie through your teeth while learning things about them.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I got a call from a company many days in a row, and it played the nice DTMF tones that cause the phone companies computer to ignore your switch hook, so when you hang up, it doesn't recognize that you have done so. after about 3 days in a row of this, I stayed on the line until I got to a real live person. I asked that I be taken off their list, and was told it would be done, but could take a few days. I Politely asked for the companies name, phone number and address, which was given to me. (it is a violation of federal law not to). I then called the phone company and after getting ahold of a person there with some real power, (this is the hardest part) explained that company A was twiddling with their computers using aforementioned DTMF tones. This is a violation of almost all phone companies TOS. The engineer type said he would look into it.
The next day, I did not receive a phone call from company A, so I decided to call them, and darn it, there phones had been disconnected.
True story, it really works. If you are persistent, you can get their phones turned off.
In the wild there are no dumb lions tigers or bears. Only humanity subsidizes the continued existence of the stupid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I should also note that Allstate is Sears is the company that back in 1995 was sued by its own middle-level executives, because top-level management sent them to Scientologist "training" that said "cheat the customer", and they quit the training and were fired.
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You can google for that one... but it's out there, and it was in the newspapers at the time. So if you buy Allstate, expect to be cheated.
But for me, what really caught my notice is that they think I'm a dog. Okay. But keep your spam away too.
- . - . -
I should also note, while I'm at it, that Allstate is by no means the only dishonest/evil insurance company. You have to be careful. For example: do not become a partner of Lloyds of London. Lloyds was discovering that all their asbestos insurance was a huge liability, so they suddenly opened their insurance to new "partners", who were relatively new multimillionaire Americans, and then switched the documentation so the asbestos liability went to them. When the Americans sued (there were about 8 of them), they were all mysteriously murdered within a year. The last I heard was that the heirs of one of them continued the suit, but the law offices of their lawyers, one of them in James City County, were all mysteriously burgled, and the documents stolen. So... umm... realize that Lloyds is owned by murderers before you do business with them. [That was from the Daily Press of Newport News, about 1996].
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I had one lady hooked, asking questions about warranty, return procedures, etc. Then I would say "hold on, somebody at the door" and put the phone down for a few minutes, and come back for more questions.
Finally, after about 25 minutes of this, I asked a question the drone did not have a script for, and the supervisor came on the line. Asked her a few questions, finally got tired of it all, and said, "You know what? I changed my mind. I don't want it after all. Thanks, bye."
I did not receive another telemarketer call for over a month. (Usually got them once a day...)
And before you go on about, telemarketers are human too, I used to work as one, etc. Well, I'm human, wish to be left alone, and if polite requests don't work, then this is war. TFB.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Idiots, yes, but I think a lot of their sales come from the elderly.
Unfortunately, I must agree with this. When I was younger, I took a job doing telemarketing calls. On my first day they gave me a list of numbers and a script to follow. After about an hour, I started to notice that most of the voices on the other end of the phone sounded fairly old. Unfortunately, the older folks were the ones going for the script too, which made me feel pretty crappy, so I threw out the list of 'leads' I had gathered so far and quit the same day.
We need to put pressure on the companies that hire these types of firms. Without any money to support them, these telemarketing/spam/etc companies will simply go away, as they are motivated by greed.
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Making fun of the telemarketer calling you is like punching someone who has their hands tied, and isn't allowed to run away...
...Who ran up to you on the sidewalk and gave you a kick in the butt because someone promised him a nickle to do it. Yes, I can insist that I be placed on the do not call list, and as often as not, the scumbag who called me will try to weasel out of it by saying back "so you want to be removed from the call list?" (meaning I will be removed for the week until the NEXT call list is generated if I agree to the statement), or do their best to hang up before I can finish saying "please place me on your do not call list".
Frankly, they deserve a physical punch in the nose, but since they're hiding behind the phone, I have to settle for a verbal assault.
In some sense, the peons making the calls are worse than their employers since they are the ones actually doing the annoying, and they do it for chump change.
Really, it need not have come to this. Telemarketers COULD use restraint by not calling at every godawful hour of the day that isn't explicitly prohibited by law, by realizing that if I didn't want my home remodeled last week, I probably don't this week either, if I say I don't have a pool, there's no sense in calling me back again for pool cleaning service, by accepting 'no' gracefully, sending out a proper caller ID rather than 'unavailable', or worse, a randomly selected personal name, and treating the people they call with respect rather than as a faceless number worth no more than the amount of cash that can be extracted from them, but obviously that didn't happen. If they're not going to play nice, they're not welcome here at all. My house, my phone, my rules.