41 Million Sign Up for National Do-Not-Call List

ejbst25 writes "The first wave of the do not call registry sign up ends 8/31. There is plenty of news coverage but they say there is already over 41 million numbers registered."

Comments

Watch out for the new ticks

[_LORAX_]

Be wary of the following if you have signed up for the list.

• Freebies: Often they come with the fine print that you exempt yourself from the list for 18 months.
  
• Sweepstakes: Ditto
  
• Checkout phone requests: If you give them your # they can call you
  
• Many many other tricks
  

Basicly there are only a few cases where you can legitimatly recieve calls.

• Charities
  
• Politicians
  
• To set up a personal meeting where no selling occurs over the phone
  

So just watch the fine print on anyhting that you put your phone # on or you could end up making the DNC list useless.

Re:Out of a total 110 million "households"

[Sphere1952]

"That means 50% of the households don't want junk phone calls. I'd say that's a pretty big "get stuffed" to the telemarketing industry."

That means 50% of the households don't want junk phone calls so badly they rushed to sign up the instant they heard about it.

You get 50% doing anything in the U.S. and that means there's 49% that just didn't get around to it.

Re:This would be great if it worked

[N7DR]

I am on the Colorado list. Not long ago I got a call and, since I had nothing much better to do, talked to the telemarketer nicely to extract as much info as possible (since it's my experience that as soon as you take a combative approach, they hang up before you've got enough information to report them).

I then went to the Web site to report them. The Web site makes it clear that the whole do-not-call system only works properly if violators are reported. So I went through a few pages of filling out forms with all the tedious details of the call. Then I hit the "submit" button and get a "your submission could not be processed" error.

OK, thinks I. This is because the morons expect me to be using IE. So I went through it all again using IE instead of Firebird. Same thing.

So I send them an e-mail at the mailto address, telling them that I wanted to report a violation and was unable to do so because the web site repeatedly gave me an error when trying to process the information.

I never heard anything from them.

I'm not sure what to conclude from this story. But I ended up being even more ticked off at the state government than I was at the telemarketer. And that's a pretty high threshold to reach.

I sure hope that the national list has a more effective mechanism for reporting offenders.