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Do-Not-Call List Could Be Opened For Phone Spam
Wick_7654 submits a link to this story at the Chicago Sun-Times, which begins "The agency overseeing the national Do Not Call Registry is considering opening a loophole to allow companies to deliver 'pre-recorded message telemarketing.' The effort is being organized by Allen Hile of the FTC's division of marketing practice. Be sure to let the FTC know how you feel about it." The proposed change specifies that recorded calls would be allowed only when an "established business relationship" exists, but provisions like that tend to be stretched to absurdity.
If things get really bad, just switch to cellphones. They can't call those, although for some reason they get a lot of wrong numbers.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
This would allow a third party to make the call for a business. Yeah, then they sell your number to a bunch of other businesses. And, since they were allowed to call, now those other businesses can call. And then, they sell your number to even more businesses...get it?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
These tactics seem to work very well on the elderly.
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Here are a few examples:
http://seniorhealth.about.com/library/eldercare/b
and another http://aging.state.ny.us/news/letter/0109scam2.ht
Most people will just hang up, but as with email spam, it only takes a few suckers to make the whole system profitable for the scum.
The scum would really love to get a hold of phone listing so they could send out their "you have won a prize in our free give away" calls.
I'm utterly stunned that these changes are even under consideration, and at taxpayer expense!
I live currently in Sydney, Australia. I have a US VoIP phone number on NDNCL, with extra anti-marketing features, and *still* manage to receive unsolicited calls from businesses that I never authorized to make such calls. I sometimes enjoy joking with the callers, "Yes, New South Wales is really a state. I don't know why it doesn't show up on your computer. Didn't you know, Australia is part of America now?"
I believe that telephone number disclosure (some outfits demand a telephone number to conduct business) should include written opt-in consent for use of that telephone number beyond the scope of the immediate transaction.
I've often remarked how much I like 'free' local calls within the USA, as opposed to most other places in the world where each call receives a flagfall. I'm beginning now to see the benefit of a caller-pays system, at least in the case of 'business-to-consumer' calls!
Just tell him you smoke weed. He'll never call again, guaranteed. Got to love how the US Army works. You can beat your wife or steal a bunch of stuff and get a second chance. But smoke some weed and you're gone immediately.
This is what I do too, and it works a treat. I *had* a landline for a while, solely for DSL and gave the phone number out to NO ONE. I STILL GOT CALLS.
Yep, that happened to me too since it is usually impossible to get DSL without a land-line (aka "naked DSL").
The solution? No telephones plugged into the landline. They can ring me all they want but I've got now way of ever even hearing it. If I really need to use the landline, in an emergecny or something, I can always plug one phone in for the duration. After a year or so, I have not needed to do that even once.
Now, if I could just get back the $20/month I waste on having a landline just for DSL...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What I wrote on the comments form; feel free to plagiarize:
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This is the worst of all possible amendments. Automated phone spam is already the most abusive, as it usually grabs the phone line and won't let go until it's done with its spiel. This wastes my time if I happen to answer the line, and wastes the limited space on my answering machine tape if it picks up. Plus in my experience, automated phone spam is the MOST likely to not have a valid way to get off the list. Oh, sure, it may give you an 800 number to call, but that's likely to reach some convoluted voicemail system that never gets you anywhere. And the concept of "prior contact" has already been stretched to mean "and everyone our company ever shares marketing information with". Not only that, but the upshot WILL be that telemarketers uniformly go to an automated model (much cheaper for them, much more annoying for us). PLEASE don't let this go through. KEEP "Do Not Call" a REAL prohibition against junk calls.
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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
My suggestion: treat it like an obscene phone call. Contact your phone company, tell them you're receiving illegal and harassing telemarketing calls, ask about using *57 (Call Trace) so you can get their number to report them to the FTC. (If your phone company won't help, try contacting the FTC directly and complaining about your phone company.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood