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Is the Do Not Call System Working?
BrentRJones writes "I signed up for the Do Not Call registry the first day I heard of it, and I have to say that I have gotten very few telemarketers calling over the past couple of years. However, there now seems to be more calls that start, 'This is a survey...' or some other such excuse. I do not mind getting a few charity appeals or calls from those I have done business with in the past, but I do wish that I could avoid the political phone calls. I am curious what other Slashdot folks are experiencing, and I am also wondering if I say, 'Please remove from any list that you have.' when I am called, will this do any good?"
So that's why they always rattle off an 800 number I'm going to have no chance in Hell of remembering or ever calling back. Hmm. Interesting.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
When the do not call lists started it worked for some time. Now a days I get blatant sales calls from (India mainly) and they spoof the caller ID system. I yell at them for violating the law, but they know they cant be caught. One option would be to listen to the pitch patiently and agree to buy whatever they are selling. Then they transfer you to some one in US for verification. When the actual vendor (usually it is DishNetwork or DirecTV in my case) comes on line, lodge a protest and threaten to call FCC. But so far I have not had the patience. So I just yell at them, call them names and hang up.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't get the marketing calls since signing up. The political calls are mostly robo-called (automated system calling, wait for a pickup, wait 10 seconds, play the message). We got that in Maryland, and I'm half tempted to bill for time.
I did get one from the Martin O'Malley campaign, being a democrat in Maryland, from an actual human. She asked "Are you going to support O'Malley for govenor?"(sp?) I told her "In the primaries because I have no choice, but forget it in the general. He's still got work to do in Baltimore (he's mayor there currently), cleaning up the mess that it is, and currently voters are thinking he's trying to escape the problems. So he's not going to get it from me come the elections."
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
There's another loop hole that most people don't know about and I haven't seen posted here yet.
It expires after 5 years and, believe it or not, it's been around for 5 years.
I had gotten rid of most calls years ago by telling every one to put me on their do not call list. I also got a recording of the "out of order" signal the telco uses and put that on my answering maching, at the start of the tape, and that helped eliminate some calls. If I didn't recognize the number, I'd let the machine get it, and there were some numbers that I used to see show up often but without a message. The telco tone at the start of my tape eliminated some of them. They called once or twice more, got the tone, and stopped showing up. I also know time online is a major issue for marketers, so I'd talk some to death -- keep them on 10-15 minutes and not buy anything. That's way more time then they should spend on the phone even for a sale.
When the do-not-call registry went active, everyone in my family registered all our phone numbers. What few calls I'd still get stopped coming in. Then, a few months ago, I started getting some calls this summer, so I looked up the registry to see if there was a problem and found out that you have to re-register every 5 years to keep your number listed.
If you're getting more calls in the last few months, it's because your registration on the list expired.
Personally, I answer all the survey calls. That way I get to tell them my favorite radio staion and my preferences in movies and other topics they ask about. Considering how few geeks there are out there, I figure it's my way of making sure someone with my tastes gets counted. As for political calls, I can usually spot them on caller ID, so I pick up the phone, then hang up.
The national do-not-call list will help keep the legit soliciters at bay. But the bad guys...well...international law is a bitch. International law really has nothing to do with do not call lists. It's all about treaties and human rights and international organizations and other cool things. International lawyers refer to legal systems within a country as "municipal", and municipal law has nothing to do with international law, except that a signatory to a treaty is required to have it's legal system enforce the articles in a treaty. That's why China never signed the treaties for human rights. Having said that, I hate telemarketers more than people who kick puppies.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
There is also a Markus from some mortgage company doing the same thing.
In each case the outbound calls are from a robo-dialer that only starts if it gets a voice mail. When I called up the telephone number they gave I got a real person which was something of a suprise. They hung up when I pointed out that their operation was facing huge civil and criminal penalties.
What I should have done but haven't got round to yet was to dial up the number several times to work out how many people are working for them.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
their time is now mine...
That's why I just ask them to hold on and then put the phone down and walk off. Sometimes it takes them 10 minutes to work out nobody's going to talk to them...
Define "charity." You'll be surprised who some of those callers really work for. The magic words to watch out for are "We are calling on behalf of." There are several for-profit companies (some of them are public, and their profits are substantial - I looked them up) who specialize in raising money for charities. They call "on behalf of" some fraternal order of police, ask for some money, give some of it (as little as 3%) to the charity, and pocket the rest. If you ask the person on the phone whether he's a volunteer, he'll tell you that he isn't. He'll gladly give you the name of his employer, and the percentage that goes to the charity. He'll even put you on a do not call list if you ask. I used to get a lot of those calls for a while, and when I started asking to be placed on the do not call list, they slowly stopped. But stop they did.
I signed up for electric and gas service here in Colorado and the person that took my information misunderstood me when I set up my account. I said "Jeff" (gasp, my first name revealed on /.) and she heard "Jess" and lo and behold, in my mailbox shortly thereafter arrived TONS of junk addressed to "Jess." Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I got any phonecalls for "Jess" but I did receive more than my fair share of junkmail, which is equally offensive to me.
The no call list has been pretty effective for my wife and I over the last few years and I can say that I have not been solicited by any companies that I did not have a previous association with.
It's better than it was...where is the national no SPAM list? Oh that's right, I have to opt-out...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I'm a first year law student taking a course in Civil Procedure and we've been covering the "long arm" theories, and I'd be curious from any lawyers or law students out there who might know (of course, I can always ask my professors, but it'd be cool to get some of this up on Slashdot for knowledge's sake) if it would be possible to say something back like:
"If you sue me for breach of oral contract, you'll have to do it in the United States, and then due to your usage of the court system in the US, you will be liable for breaking the Do Not Call list law (or whatever it is called)."
I mean, it's not like their threat holds any water, but I'm curious about this, since it is germane to my current studies.
Even after the do-not call list thing I was getting a few calls a month from charities and "Other." Haven't had a problem since I installed asterisk though. I've got a voice menu system in place and tell telemarketers to dial 1. If they do, I tell them not to call again and disconnect them. Since I added the voice menu system I haven't had one unwanted phone call get through. So far I haven't even had to resort to playing the phone system tones that tell the remote caller the number's disconnected. Asterisk is capable, but I haven't had to turn that on.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you get a call asking for a donation to a charity, beware!
I am a fairly generous person, and I made donations in response to several of these calls. The problem is that I started getting calls from many more charities than I donated to that began with "thank you for your donatin in the past." When I say many more, I mean at least an order of magnitude more.
Next, I happened to have two of the return envelopes in my hand at the same time and noticed that the addresses were extremely similar, so rather than send them in, I sat on them for a while and started to notice that all of these charities had only two or three addresses.
Next, I started researching this. I found a report from the NY attourney general about the scandalously small portions of the donations that make their way to the named charity. Typically, the charity gets 25%, give or take 15%. In some very rare cases, it is even worse.
This has lead me to a ritual whenever I get such a request.
Understand that you are dealing with salespeople here. There are honest salespeople, and there are dishonest salespeople. The dishonest ones do not believe that the truth has anything to do with achieving their objectives, so you may have to perform a sort of impromptu cross-examination here.
I generally try to be polite, but this doesn't always work.
First, interrupt the spiel. Ask the operator if he/she is a professional fundraiser. Most will reply "yes", some will try to dance around the subject. If they dance around it, define professional for them, and ask the question again. On one occasion, an operator told me that he was not, so I clarified it by asking, "Are you telling me that you are a volunteer, that you receive no payment except for the warmth in your heart of doing a good deed?" That got the answer I was expecting, that he did, indeed, draw a wage, to which I said, "then you are a professional fundraiser."
Now ask the operator what percentage goes to the charity. You will get a non-response response, something like "It's a 75/25 split." The only exception I have encountered to this has been on the handful of occasions when I have been told that I need to call a different number (which, BTW, doesn't get answered) if I want to know that.
In the case where they tell me the split, I press for an answer to which part of the split goes to the charity. This will inevitably get a spiel back about how it would be nice to be able to give 100%, but because of staffing, postage, telecom costs, blah blah blah, only 25% can go to the charity. This is where I tell them that that is too little, and that I have no intentions of paying them $7.50 (or whatever) to give $charity $2.50 on my behalf. Sometimes they will continue to try to convince me, but at this point, I stand firm.
The other case is easier. When I am told the other phone number that I must call to get an answer to this question that really should be in the hands of the operators already, my response is that if they can't answer a basic question like that, then I won't donate through them.
Last, but not least, let me suggest that you pick a charity or two, of your own accord, and donate to it.
www.wavefront-av.com
We are on the national and state do not call lists, which has indeed eliminated a large majority of the calls. The calls I still get are generally from some place that I "have a business relationship with", meaning, I bought something there once and wrote a check or something so they have my phone number. I also use Caller ID to screen these calls, and yes, they will call numerous times before they give up. It seems to me that telephones, now-a-days, should be sophisticated enough for me to program them to not ring if the caller ID shows one of the IDs that I don't want to answer, and perhaps to give them a different outgoing message than my normal "You have reached... leave a message after the beep." Do phones like that exist?
What does NOT work is to screen telemarketers with Caller ID (which is what my wife does.) She doesn't answer when it says something like "CRAPPY CARPET CLEANERS", or she'll tell me "don't answer, it's those damn carpet people again." But they'll call back over and over and over for like a week or two. Finally, I'll answer with my magic phrase, and lo! they quit calling instantly. It's easier on everybody to be brisk with them earlier rather than later.
yes it does. I add that number to my asterisk phone system and they automatically get a fake message that is about 10 minutes long faking that I am answering and trying to understand them and ending with a 2khz squeal at maximum level that asterisk can put out. I need to modify it with a perl script that uses 1 of 3 or 4 different recording to screw with them more but I notice in my logs that they dont call back after the 3rd try and realise I'm screwing with them.
my phone never rings, and because I use VOIP, I can still recieve and make calls on my line as I hold a telemarketer on the phone messing whth them. Now if only there was a list I could subscribe to that had all telemarketers numbers or callerid strings listed to make it automatic.
BTW, blocked or out of area calls go directly to voicemail and also never ring my phone... works like a charm.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.