First Caller-ID Spoofers Punished

coondoggie plugs a NetworkWorld story that begins, "The first telemarketers charged with transmitting false Caller IDs ... to consumers were fined and barred from continuing their schemes by a New Jersey District Court judge.... [T]wo individuals and one corporate defendant have been barred from violating the agency's Telemarketing Sales Rule and its Do Not Call requirements ... They were also found liable for $530,000 in damages ... [T]he case was the first brought by the Commission alleging the transmission of phony caller ID information or none at all."

Comments

I hope that this set precedent...

[dotancohen]

I hope that this set precedent for spammers.

http://what-is-what.com/what_is/spam.html

Re:I hope that this set precedent...

[omeomi]

I don't understand why this hasn't happened sooner. I've filled out that complaint form on donotcall.gov a number of times since it's inception when I get a call from some telemarketer for a company I've never dealt with. I always hoped that, even if my individual complaints weren't looked into, maybe they would aggregate complaints, and investigate the bigger offenders. Apparently they haven't really even been doing that...

Re:I hope that this set precedent...

[Neanderthal Ninny]

The current pain for me is the "Your vehicle warranty has expired..." which is a recorded message and if you are interested you press 1 to get transfer to an telemarketing human.
Pity more than half of my "telemarketing" calls are these pre-recorded message so I can't really truly counterscript them. Also they drop the line before I can get any information on them. I would like to send these people to Abu Ghraib or some other gulag.

Jesus Christ

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Call me! No wait! Don't call me! *wink wink*

That's a whole lot of money for getting called.

You know who else should get slapped with a fine? Companies that hire telemarketers.

Re:Jesus Christ

[Hans Lehmann]

Gives us legitimate telemarketing companies a bad name.

There are *no* legitimate telemarketing companies. Nobody has ever asked you to call them on the telephone and try to sell them something; stop trying to pretend otherwise. If you call me with a sales pitch, regardless of what it is or who you represent, I'll want your head on a pike.

Re:Jesus Christ

[Dare nMc]

Gives us legitimate telemarketing companies a bad name.

Then get to complaining to the DMA, if you want any consumers to take any telemarketer serious then get them to stop defending the right to continue bad practices. And get them to start requesting laws, and enforcement to clean up the industry, instead of the opposite.

Re:Jesus Christ

[Raineer]

If I want your product, I'll go looking for it. This is the beauty of the internet age. I do not need to be called at home and be "sold" on something I did not ask for. If I called you, and you are returning my call, this is completely different.

Re:Jesus Christ

[jjhall]

There are legit telemarketing companies. I know of a couple who call people regarding renewals of their magazine subscriptions. They are calling their existing customers who have not yet renewed, offering a discounted renewal rate if they renew before their subscription runs out.

I do believe you have a point that there are no legit cold-call telemarketing companies.

Ban them from using phones

[Reality Master 201]

When "hackers" get caught, it's not uncommon for the judge to ban them from using computers for a period of time. Ban the caller ID spoofers from using a telephone for a few years, either for business or personal use (with an emergency usage exception).

Re:Ban them from using phones

[Schadrach]

You mean like being made to register as a sex offender, immediately causing everyone who hears such to assume you are a pedophile and/or rapist?

Re:Ban them from using phones

[Anonymous Coward]

What about when your phone rings nonstop, every 2-3 minutes 24x7 and it's nothing but offshore telemarketers using VOIP portals? Is that still just an inconvenience?

why waste their time and money?

[AntEater]

"...calling consumers on the National DNC Registry"

Maybe someone can help me understand something here. Why would a company want to waste their resources marketing to people who have made an overt effort to opt-out? Do they really think that people will make a purchase if they could through?

Personally, I've put my number on the "do not call list" and I wouldn't buy anything from a telemarketer purely as a matter of principle - I'd pay more elsewhere just to avoid encouraging this form of marketing. I've never met anyone who didn't feel similar about getting sales calls at home.

Re:why waste their time and money?

[CheeseTroll]

In theory, that makes perfect sense. But in practice, there are enough people who, even though they don't like being called, still get talked into stuff over the phone. "No, I'm not interested. Wait, you said I could lower my mortgage payments by *how* much?"

When the DNC lists went into effect, many telemarketers tried to spin it into a positive thing, saying that the gov't was actually helping them by cleansing their lists of the people who wouldn't buy anything anyway. It was cute, because the DNC lists really killed their old business models. Looks like the survivors out there are relying heavily on loopholes in the law and the relative lack of enforcement.

Re:why waste their time and money?

[nerdonamotorcycle]

Many people register for the DNC list precisely because they know they have difficulty refusing telephone sales pitches. Therefore, the DNC list may represent a list of people who are actually more likely than average to buy whatever a telemarketer is offering.

Re:why waste their time and money?

[ClientNine]

"...calling consumers on the National DNC Registry" Maybe someone can help me understand something here. Why would a company want to waste their resources marketing to people who have made an overt effort to opt-out? Do they really think that people will make a purchase if they could through?

I've worked in 2 telemarketing companies when I was a young lad-- degrading work, but indoors and no heavy lifting-- and I can tell you that the First Rule Of Spammers applies to them: They're dumb.

As far as I could tell none of the floor managers had any interest whatsoever in making sales. They cared about other critical metrics such as minimizing bathroom breaks, total number of calls made, how many "objections" we "overcame" before disconnecting, script adherence, etc, but not about sales. I mean, of course they *officially* cared about sales and were paid on it, but they were generally too stupid to realize that forcing someone with a talent for salesmanship to 100% adhere to a poorly written script was NOT making anyone money.

Some of my favorite boneheaded moves I had to work with:

• * Scripts written by non-native English speakers, loaded with grammatical errors
• * Setting predictive dialers to such an aggressive setting that most people had been on a dead line saying "hello?" for 5-10 seconds before we came on, thus ensuring that they were good and pissed before the pitch even started
• * Scripts starting with a horribly insincere line like "How are you today?", thus pissing away the 10-15 seconds of "grace time" most callers will give you before getting annoyed
• * Forbidding drinking water at the desk because it resulted in "too many bathroom breaks"-- not a good move for people whose job is to talk fast and long
• * Calling sequential numbers during evening hours, thus resulting in things like waking up an entire hospital ward, 1 room after another
• * Having sales checked the next day by "callback verifiers", thus requiring the customer who just barely was willing to buy the newspaper have to sit through another annoying 3-minute call in order to put the sale thru, assuming you could actually get the guy on the horn
• * Putting actual bonafide lies in the script, and forcing us to tell more lies when customers called us out on them
• * Recycling calling lists so fast that people received 2-5 calls in the same day, thus guaranteeing that no sales would be made after the first go-thru and even rssulting in some customers calling to cancel previous sales out of sheer annoyance
• * forbidding us from ending a call until the customer had said "no" *3* times, even though the call was clearly a waste of time an annoying to everyone after the first (or maybe 2nd) one
• * And my favorite: At one place we were forbidden from ever hanging up first, thus *guaranteeing* that every call ended acrimoniously. In a few cases we got crazies or wiseasses who just set the phone down and walked away, leaving the TC (telmarketing consultant) sitting helplessly with his/her hand in the air waiting for the shift supervisor to eventually notice and then walk over and hit "disconnect" for them.

It was a dumb industry. Good riddance to it, even though it helped pay my rent for a while.

Re:why waste their time and money?

[GuldKalle]

I didn't say everybody on the list were pushovers. Anyway, that's the only explanation I can come up with.

Re:Never did understand

[gweihir]

Easy: Stupidity once removed, i.e. some telemarketeer gets paid by the number of calls made where somebody was on the other side, not the number of sales. Personally I never buy products that telemarketers advertised ever again, but it seems not enough people handle it that way.

to remove yourself from this list, click here

[tepples]

Why would a company want to waste their resources marketing to people who have made an overt effort to opt-out? Why does unsubscribing from V1A9R4 spam lists get you more spam?

"have been barred..."

[Anita Coney]

Part of their punishment was to be barred from violating the very rules they were convicted of violating?! Does that make any sense?!

Re:what about those 000-000-0000 nums?

[Chineseyes]

Political and non-profit organizations are exempt from Do Not Call laws. Also caller id spoofing is not illegal.

Grom he actual bill that was passed:

IN GENERAL - It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States, in connection with any telecommunications service or IP-enabled voice service, to cause any caller identification service to knowingly transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value, unless such transmission is exempted pursuant to paragraph (3)(B).

Unless the Obama camp was attempting to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value from you it is perfectly legal for them or any other organization to spoof their caller id.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because then it's contempt of court which can be punished very quickly.

Re:How did they track the telemarketers down?

[Tuoqui]

Actually it is even easier if you have a T1 line... The thing is built into the T1 gear which is what most of these telemarketers have unfortunately.

Spam and Telemarketing ARE profitable which is why people do it. As they say there's a sucker born every minute. Also the odds are high that this is a 'separate company' spun off by someone to do telemarketing and thus avoiding the actual judgments on their legitimate businesses.

Just hang up?

[northstarlarry]

Sure, it's a hoot the first time or two around, but the thing that we hate about telemarketers is the distraction and waste of time that they represent, isn't it? When you start running through these scripts, dragging out the call instead of just hanging up, isn't that even more of a waste of your own time, taking you away from whatever interesting thing it was that you were doing?

It seems to me that a simple hang-up is just as (not very) effective at stopping telemarketing as a phenomenon, and takes about 1/100th the time.

I try to be considerate to other persons: let them merge in traffic, hold the door open, not stand in front of the shelf they want to look at, and so forth, but I'm not really inclined to martyr my own time so that someone somewhere won't get a call. That person can do the same as I: just hang up.