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Fraudsters Abusing Canada's Do-Not-Call List
J ROC writes "Phone numbers on Canada's Do-Not-Call registry have apparently been sold to off-shore telemarketers, scam artists, and other ne'er-do-wells, according to reports in the Globe & Mail and CBC News. The CRTC, which runs the registry, sells lists of phone numbers online for a small fee; making it available to anybody who might be interested in buying it, including con artists. I guess this explains why, ever since I added my number to the registry, I've been getting phone calls from 000-000-0000 trying to interest me in some free vacation scam. Canada's Privacy Commissioner is currently investigating."
What idiots -- Illegally contact people that you already know are especially hostile toward dealing with you. How many sales do they actually expect to make?
It looks like we now need a do-not-call, do-not-call list!!
That's it! I'm moving to... oh, wait. Nevermind.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Leave it to the bleeding CRTC to pull something like this.
Those of us whom have signed up for your "please call me more frequently than normal" list did NOT agree to have you sell our names to Sook-Mehoff Incorporated.
I find myself even further disgusted by the CRTC's actions. How can something like this be allowed to happen?
Government? You anywhere to be found? *Can you hear me..me..me..me..me...*
To the CRTC: Do something right, or don't even bother doing it at all.
Log calls and invoice the registry operator for your time. Don't know about anybody else but if I'm doing something involved (eg: accounts, coding, electronics) it takes me 10 - 15 minutes to get back to where I was.
My phones are for the benefit of family, friends, buisness and emergencies. Other interruptions are simply not welcome.
I added my cell, the wife's cell and our home phone number to the list. A month or so later, I got my first telemarketer call.
I called up the government's do not call list registry to complain, but they hung up on me and told me that they weren't interested in what I was selling. They asked "how would I like it if they called me at home during dinner", and asked to be taken off of my call list
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Wow, good job CRTC.
My telemarketing calls went from about 2 a week to 6+. Good thing I'm rarely home and they get the answering machine instead.
That is the most annoying call ever. I blame bell for all this. THey're making money of each scam call in network fees.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I've been getting this calls before they even made that do not call list (from Toronto, Ontario). I've gotten that captain one about 4 times in the past 2 months. And most of the time the numbers are 100-000-0000 for me.
If you no longer wish to receive our emails for the crap we sell, just reply by email with the following:
Sunject:I am a real, valid email address
Body:
Your age
Number of children
Do you own a home?
Take prescription meds?
And we promise to remove you forever!
My Fritzbox simply rejects phonecalls with suppressed caller ID.
Wow, that sucks. I bet it rained on your wedding day too.
I'm in Canada and find, via *69, that these calls are coming from telemarketers with phone numbers in the United States. So, the list is working. We're not getting calls from Canada we're getting them from the States and, likely, there are equivalent scenarios being used to get around do-not-call lists for the States. Since the calls are coming from the States you can try to put your number on their list but they won't accept an area code outside of the U.S. So, that's how you get around the list. Originate your calls for one country from another country that doesn't abide by the do-not-call list. What's going to be needed now are cross border agreements that each country will help enforce the other's do-not-call lists.
*Sound of fog horn*
I agree, that's the most irritating call I've ever gotten. I normally hang up on telemarketers, but now I make a point of trying to keep that one on the line as long as possible.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I think that is the first time I have heard of international telemarketing. I have heard the exact same recorded message here in the UK.
You can de-register your phone # by doing the following:
from https://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/annins-dereg-eng.
Carry on.
I get those annoying calls trying to tell me I won a trip all the time. The CRTC has pretty much screwed the do not call list up royally. The only thing I can see the CRTC doing to help is to force the Telcos to make call blocking free so we can all block the annoying numbers for free. That way as soon as we get a telemarketer we can add the number to the block list and never hear from them again.
To DNC registry worked well for a while. But then unscrupulous telemarketers started figuring out how to issue bogus number identifications so you can't issue complaints against them, and using an automated system, claiming to be about your auto warranty, or your "credit card company" (not by name), and try to get you to press 1 - at which point you then establish a business relationship with the telemarketer/vendor and they are then exempt from harassing you forever more.
Lately, we have been getting numerous phone calls from "Texas Guaranteed". And now, I'm getting phone calls from a "white pages/yellow pages" company to continue a listing for my fictional company which has never had a listing in any pages since it isn't really real. The funny part is these are from a real person, who gets rude when my wife says that she won't talk to them.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
"the only ones I do (and they're annoying) are from the RBC Royal Bank trying to sell me insurance, "
That sure is a nice cellphone you got there, sure would be a shame if something happened to it. Maybe you'd better buy some 'insurance'
Why not just provide a list of hashed phone numbers instead?
The CRTC should create a series honey-pot numbers, and give different combinations to those who purchase the lists. Scammers and those-who-sell-to-scammers would not be aware of which numbers are honey-pot numbers, and would call them anyways.
The CRTC could use this to easily weed out the bad from the good.
Here's the way you do it...
Telemarketer comes up with a list. Telemarketer sends list to the Do-Not-Call team. Do-Not-Callers do the compare, and return only the numbers that were on the telemarketer's list that doesn't match the no-call list.
Telemarketer gains the information of the numbers they can't call, but doesn't gain the whole no-call list unless they had it already.
I've also seen an increase in the usual scam calls recently, and it seems to be pretty evenly spread across all the phones I answer (home, 3 cell, 1 listed work and 1 unlisted work number). Only the home number is on the DNC list.
I think it's a combination of effects. Perhaps a handful of scammers going online simultaneously, wardialling, and teh DNC list being abused.
And, really, is anyone surprised that someone who is already doing something illegal (telephone scams) wouldn't illegaly use the DNC list?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I think that will not help much if you are already getting telemarketer calls. If your phone number has already been sold by the CRTC then it's out there. It can be sold by the telemarketer and resold much like email addresses and SPAM.
I think everyone has been getting these, whether or not you have signed up for the do-not-call list.
I've had 000 calls range from travel/vacation scams to offers from Bell Canada telephone/cell/tv. Really doesn't make me like Bell Canada any more than I do currently (which on a scale of 1-10 is in the negatives now from my last count).
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Wilfully abusing systems intended to control or curb malicious or abusive behavior should come with triple the established penalty unless they can show it was somehow accidental beyond a reasonable doubt. But what happens when these calls are coming in from the U.S. or from Pakistan or some such place outside of Canada's jurisdiction? I don't know.
Better idea: ALL outbound calling phone business activities should be properly licensed in some way. Once again, local laws and regulations need to apply...
This is beginning to feel like that stupid form letter with the check boxes saying "your solution advocates a _______ solution and will not work because of one or more of the following ..."
This calls for a vigilante group with super-powers to destroy the perpetrators.
"Your solution advocates a __super-hero__ solution and will not work because __super-heroes_are't_real__" DAMNIT!
In this case, there is no effective difference between a list of the numbers themselves and a list of the hashes thereof. You can trivially do a dictionary attack covering the whole phone number space, as there cannot be more than 10^10 phone numbers on the list (given a ten-digit phone number space).
Think about how trivial it is to run an exhaustive search across eight lower-case alphabetic characters. It's easily more than an order of magnitude less work to traverse the entire ten digit phone number space naively.
Now, if you *want* to have some efficiency and you're even minutely intelligent, you don't need to bother traversing the entire space naively. Instead, you take into account that the first three digits are an area code, and therefore populated with significantly fewer than 1000 different values. You can also eliminate several swaths from the trailing seven digits by taking into account a few rules (such as seven-digit phone numbers not beginning with 1 or 0).
Likely the only thing you'd get out of releasing hashes instead of numbers are that someone would make a Windows-only application to sanitize your telemarketing lists for the low, low price of $250 per seat.
I used to receive multiple calls daily on my Bell line after a new phone number was added to the phone book. I registered with both the CRTC do not call list and Michael Geist's ioptout.ca and my the amount of calls I received dropped dramatically within a month or two.
I occasionally had blips where the same number would continually call me, so I filled out the CRTC form for each number, and a very helpful woman tracked them both down - one number was Canadian and enforced to stop calling, the other was American and could not be legally bound to stop, however she politely asked them to stop calling me and they did. For those in this post that claim they contacted the CRTC and they wouldn't help, I don't believe you
Two calls from an unsolicited number is all I ever get. After the second call the number simply gets screened and the incoming call gets forwarde--guess where--back to itself. Sometimes I get giddy imagining the telemarketer reciting her pitch to the person in the next cubicle.
Of course, callers with the caller ID of "000-000-0000" or "10" simply get forwarded to the Rejection Hotline.
I'm on primus, but I imagine other voip providers have similar functionality, as would asterisk and its ilk.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I wonder if that's the same scammer who's been calling me almost every day for the last two months? My caller ID box shows a Florida number (561-xxx-xxxx, which could be a fake), so I never pick up, but the caller never left a message until just last week. Then I had his pitch captured on my voice mail: it was from "Imperial Majesty Cruise Lines" claiming I've received a free cruise. I've reported every instance to the national Do Not Call registry, but the calls just kept coming until a few days ago.
I think sending the FTC a complete transcript of each voice mail message may have helped.
If telemarketers are all calling from 123-456-7890 or 000-000-0000, then why not program your phone to simply ignore calls from these numbers?
When called, first talk really quietly so they turn their headset up, then use a very sharp whistle (or a foghorn, up to you and how sensitive your neighbors are). Repeat as needed until they hang up.
For some odd reason, I don't get any telemarketer calls anymore. Works better than any do-not-call list.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Happens all the time... Our main line is on TPS and gets 2-3 calls a week from recorded messages with american accents saying we've won something implausible.
We just leave it off the hook. If they're prepared to pay international call rates for their scam they're going to pay as much as I can fleece them for.
Why not register the CRTC to the list? So when THEY receive a call for a free vacation they could issue scammers a fine riiiiiite away?
More proof that the CRTC is absolute junk. The only thing they're good for is patting Bell on the back and waiting for the FCC to make a decision and claiming it as theirs.
They have no accountability and are responsible for such wonderful things like our horrible TV service and world renowned cellular service.
I mean, seriously, who thought it was a good idea to sell people's private phone numbers without checking up on whomever was requesting it?
It should always have been "You call these people, you are fined. Oh, you don't know who they are? Send us some paperwork and we may send you a list. Until then, I would advise you don't call anyone".
If you don't sign up for the list, you end up in much smaller pool of available numbers for legal telemarketing companies to pull from. Which of course means more calls for fewer people.
If you do sign up for the list, stuff like this happens.
Please remove me from the do not call list, I don't wished to be called anymore. Opps, too late!!
Sorry, but you are ignorant. +Informative is entirely undeserved. This is YOUR PROBLEM.
First off, pre-existing business relationships never fall under the category of telemarketing. They are specifically exempt. That is why your bank can call you on your cell phone. You need to inform them that they can no longer call you and threaten to terminate your business relationship when they do. Then actually grow a pair and terminate it when they do. Walk in and talk to a branch manager and send a letter to the regional management stating that you intend to do so, and another letter/conversation when you actually do. That will affect them. It is your failure to properly deal with your own bank.
I used to do database consulting for a Telemarketing company and I was made responsible for creating a system that checked their own lists against the Canadian registry as well as the US registry. It is IMPOSSIBLE to create a registry in which the information is not made available to the same people you hate. I didn't like them either, I just worked for the devil for awhile. Had to eat you know.
When you don't put your number into that registry you don't ever have the right to complain since both the Telemarketers that are in compliance and the offending ones have no idea that you are on the list. You really think the offending ones are using the lists of people that hate telemarketers? I can promise you it is not the case in the US. The firms in the US love the lists since calling the people on it is a waste of time and money.
Not putting your number on that list actually hurts you more than helps. The moment any marketer or list broker *thinks* your number is active with a person on the other end your number will make it to everyone within 90 days. I SWEAR IT IS TRUE.
At least with the registries most sane telemarketing firms religiously scrub their own lists against them. They don't want to risk the fines. They also don't want to risk attention from the government. In the case of the US, once attention came from attorney generals from a state they wrote off *the whole state*.
I can tell you that I found access to lists for *everything*. The telephone companies would tell us what ranges were active, what were reserved, special ranges, etc. Just like TCP/IP defines 192.168.x.x do be a private network only, there are the same rules created for 10 digit phone numbers.
I could even get at the time every single cell phone number range in the US. No shit. Why?
Calling a cell phone was considered insanity. Do it enough and the cell phone company itself will *butt fuck* you into oblivion since you are messing with their systems and pissing off their customers. You are not just messing with the customers, but costing the cell phone company money. All that system bandwidth you suck up could have been sold to one of their customers. In fact, I know in the US it is illegal to telemarket to a cell phone *PERIOD*. That is why I used the cell phone lists at the time to scrub out any cell phones in my clients database.
Put simply, the vast majority of so-called legitimate telemarketing firms were in compliance with the registries and not putting your number on the registry was just stupid.
As for the jerks that are calling anyways, well that is Canada's fault for not actually spending the resources to enforce the lists in the first place. They may have well just given hand jobs to all the telemarketing execs.
I can tell you that US is far more serious. The FCC and attorney generals were very vigilant in prosecuting offenders and telemarketing firms that violated the lists, or called cell phones, were quickly given the shaft by some government agency.
Putting your number on the US registry *plain fucking works*.
...I am not signing up for a DNC list here in The Netherlands (called "Info Filter").
I have gotten a lot of issues with a local lottery ('National Zip Code Lottery'), and have written them numerous letters to leave me alone. Even the government insisted I put myself on the "Info Filter" list, but I objected citing the fact that the list is run by the spammers themselves.
So I filed a complaint with the foundation that the spammers are in - "Commercial Code Commission" - which is obligated (by their own statute..) to correct mistakes in commercials.
I put in my complaint that they (the lottery) got numerous letters from me that I didn't want on their mailing list, and have 100% proof they have read those letters. The case is accepted, and I am waiting for the lotterys' response, and will seriously consider the courts if they decide negatively.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
One step in the right direction to a solution it to not allow "Unknown Number" calls any more. Yes, I know people can spoof their number (that would be the obvious step #2...) but, preventing people from hiding their numbers would go a long ways towards reducing the number of unwanted calls ("I don't recognize this number - screw it, voicemail can take it if it's important"). The fact that people can still hide their number is simply mind-boggling to me. If _you_ are calling _me_ (and thus invading my privacy) then you should have no expectation of privacy in return. Solve that hypocrisy and dealing with unwanted phone calls will become easier. imho
I added my numbers to the Canadian Direct Marketer's internal "Do not call" list years ago and saw a dramatic decrease in calls and unsolicited mail. I added my numbers to the new federal list a few days after it was unveiled, and the calls from local hearing aid companies and carpet cleaners dried up. The system works.
Where it falls down is that there's no effective way for the Canadian government to regulate foreign calls, so we still receive the dreaded 000-000-00000 "You've won a cruise!" recordings and occasional offers to reduce the interest rate on credit cards we don't have. Parliament should approve the use of JTF2 to shut down those operations - it would take mere minutes and word would get around pretty quickly. :)
And one can stop spam by using the same technique that both Canada and the U.S. use for scams : charge the company that's paying for it.
Mind you, that does require extra staffing for the fraud squad! A suitable levels of fines applied to the companies who pay for this dreck should nicely cover it.
Hmmn, time to write to my MP!
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I signed up for that do not call list, and then almost immediately realized "Hey... I'm not getting any telemarketing calls. Why would I put my phone number on there now?" so I took it off immediately. Instinct paid off!
I take that back -- the scammer called again just now.
Why are they giving out the actual phone numbers and not a hash? Is it too trivial to create a lookup table for all possible phone numbers? Can't the government add a random extra 10 digits to the end and give those hashes? Then the lookup table would be orders of magnitude bigger.
If my number is 613-555-1234, then they could give out the hash for 612355512341947364957 or 6135551234967365973 or one of 10 billion different numbers with my real number at the start. It can still work for exculsionary purposes. The telemarketers would have to hash my number 10 billion times and if it matched even once then my number is excluded.
Number 123-456-7890 calling
*Sound of fog horn*
Automatic voice: "Hello, this is your captain calling... Congratulations, you've won a trip to..."
Or sometimes it's a number 000-000-0000 like from the summary, I can confirm that. It's ANNOYING AS HELL.
Yup, I've got both of these ... (I'm in Waterloo, Ontario.)
After having signed up for the DNC list, I'd say that I get fewer calls of the "sponsor my charity" type, and way more calls from the Captain, whom I wish we could make walk off the plank.
Change your phone number to an unlisted number. Give it to friends, family and work. Then give it to the companies that absolutely need to get in contact with you such as your bank, credit card companies, etc. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act (PIPEDA) prohibits those companies from sharing your personal information except in cases where it would be considered reasonable. Say, if you default on payments passing your information to a collection agency. But, selling your contact information on a list to telemarketers would be outside what is considered reasonable.
Do that enough times and by comparing what they got back with what they had telemarketers would be able to build the DNC list.
You may have seen the Globe article about telemarketers using the do-not-call list as a source of people to call, including some explicitly fraudulent calls: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090123.wdonotcall23/BNStory/National/home
There's quite an discussion on one of the nerd sites on this (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1312203) where I ran across it.
It strikes me we can best deal with this by addressing companies that pay for the unwanted calls. Not the companies that do the illegal acts, but instead the ones who pay them.
They (Canadian) purchasers of the illegal advertisements deserve a nasty fine. Mind you, that does require extra staffing for the investigators! An appropriate levels of fines, though, should nicely cover the cost.
To a degree, the same thing would dry up email spam: if there was a Canadian do-not-spam list, and substantial fines for paying someone to disobey it, the number of Canadian spammers would fall rapidly. Alas, Canada isn't where all the illegal calls and emails originate, so that might have to wait for a majority of countries to implement it.
Returning to do-not-call lists, a purely Canadian effort to fine the paymasters would dry up a lot of the calls, especially the ones being made from local numbers or for Canadian products.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
in my country of AMERICA, we have a special organisation called the N.S.A. that filters bad calls for us. All canadiens should file a complaint with their phone company to urge them to sign up for this fantastic service. I'm pretty sure it's free.
A phone call may seem legitimate, but the real reason may be recording words in your original voice to reproduce them for a con later.
You have to identify the caller, Inform them that your number is on the do not call list.
Usually the first whiff they get that you are going to do that they hang up.. ask for their supervisor, they hang up. Say "I am on" click - gone
Or they take your info and promise to put you on their do not call list, in like 6 months.
and then they call back...
If you do manage to ask the name of their company its usually the name of the company that bought advertising.
Caller ID says: "no number, no name." I don't answer any call I don't recognize the caller ID.
Is take the call, feign interest, and give slightly wrong information. i.e. if your address is 222 SW Mirrison street, you would say 666 NW Devil Street. repeat. When the credit card part comes up, keep giving them a number that starts with your bank code (the first four,) but make up the rest. This eats into their time and costs.
If there is a list, and it has value, it will eventually be sold. It is important to remember that the government consists of regular people, not angels, no different from people doing any other job. A certain percentage will be unscrupulous, as in any collection of people, and the unscrupulous will be attracted to positions of power, influence and money, just like in any other organization.
You might be able to vote out the person who wrote the bill, and the politicians that put it into law, but you can't vote out the bureaucrat that actually handles the goods -- that person is outside the influence of us regular citizens. Not because of any Star Room conspiracy, but simply because he's the person who has access, and the temptation is too great.
So for a given list, like a do-not-call list, or back-door passwords held in escrow, or a list of people in a certain position, if it has value, an unscrupulous person will find a way to cash in on it, or someone will be coerced into doing so by another unscrupulous person. The more valuable the list, the more likely that the attempt will be made.
This is vital to remember. When you hear "the government will take care of it" the first question you should ask is "why do you think so? What makes the people that make up the government any different from the people who make up, say, the phone company?"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Dial 9 during this call, it will 'remove' you.
I have done this personally and do not get this call anylonger.
I am on the west coast of Canada and recieved that call almost everyday.
I usually dial'ed 1 to get a person on the line and pretended I'm a cop and the call has been forwarded to their Telemarketing abuse center ;)
I live in Canada, but never got around to putting my name on the Do Not Call list. I just hang up as soon as I know I have a telemarketer on the line. But my number of telemarketer calls has gone way down since the Do Not Call list came into effect. I hardly get any now.
My cell carrier has me under contract until June 2010. I've been with them since 2001, and have never hard problems with them before.
But lately, they changed their branding and plans around. And for some reason, they decided to contract a company to call all their users.
That company is an incompetent bunch of assholes.
So after about 15 days of being called twice per day by the assholes, who would hang up as soon as I answered, and multiple complaints back to my carrier, I signed up on the DNC list on their suggestion.
My phone calls are now down from two a day to one or two a week. They're the super annoying foghorn one mentioned elsewhere, but at least I can hang up as soon as I hear the horn.
(Aside: My incoming calls are free. So this isn't hurting me financially, it's just pissing me off.)
The only spam calls we get are from the Conservative party. Even after repeatedly asking them to stop...
I went through the whole process with that call. I gave them a fake name. When they called back one day to confirm the trip, I got them to repeat the name back to me. Peter Eater. Then I told them I already lived in the Bahamas and they hung up.
The phone companies could create a bunch of toll-call numbers (with a crazy fee for the caller, of course and are of no public use) and mix them up with the DNC list. That way, a spammer, who is dialing all numbers from the list, will eventually (maybe in a 1-1 ratio) hit those toll-call numbers and thus have a huge bill to pay.
Keep dreaming, international VoIP, for them at least, will be dirt cheap.
I can't get away from telemarketers and scammers ever since I added my effing number to that blasted registry.
Shortly after I added my home phone, I started getting calls on my cell, which is not connected to my home number at all.
I even changed my cell number to no avail... How the hell is that I keep getting scammers calling my cell 1 dam day after I change my effing number?
My government should get off their asses and make it a felony offense to sell private data like this.
I even get scam calls on my Skype account... WTF
As I wrote this I got 2 calls. One on my home phone and one on my cell.
If this keeps up I'll just turn off my cell, unplug my phone and make a network of cans on strings to the people I communicate with most.
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
Here's a tip to let telemarketers know how you feel about them calling you when you're on a do-not-call list:
Keep a whistle next to your phone, so that whenever you get a telemarking call you know exactly what to do...
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Try running a program called jcblock, available on sourceforge.net. Just enter 'jcblock' is the site's search window. It works for me (I wrote it!).
I have a way to screen them, and that is my listed name in the phone directory. They ask in the States how you want your name listed. So I either list as just initial, and last name, or a bogus name. Telemarketers always call you by the name listed in the phone book. So As soon as I hear that name listed in the phone book. I hang up. I am not on the do not call list. Maybe the telemarketers removed me from their list? {grin} I don't get call backs.
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*Sound of fog horn* Automatic voice: "Hello, this is your captain calling... Congratulations, you've won a trip to..."
Or sometimes it's a number 000-000-0000 like from the summary, I can confirm that. It's ANNOYING AS HELL.
I get that one periodically as well. But I was getting it before I signed up for the DNC - frequency seems to have gone down, but I doubt it's related to the list.
You may have more oil then Saudi Arabia, but your neighbor has more tanks AND REALLY LIKE OIL.
I'd go into your bank and ask if you can be taken off their marketing lists.
I had the same thing happen with CIBC and one day I got a pushy salesman that pissed me off. I marched into the local branch, told them my sad story, and then was somewhat surprised to see them clicking away at their computer and unchecking me from several lists.
The teller said it's quite rare that people ask to be taken off those lists. It must be because so few people know about it.
I keep getting that one as well. The other really annoying one is:
"Oh, I'm sorry. I have the wrong number."
*click*
WTF??
The vast majority of the telemarketing calls I'm getting now are automated.
They should do what they do in some countries. The PERSON is added to the do-not-call list, not their phone number.
We shouldn't have to go to the trouble to ask to be taken off a list. The default should be *opt-in*, not *opt-out*.
Unless I've given specific permission to a company, a charity, a pollster, a politician, or a charity they shouldn't be allowed to call me, PERIOD. The DNC lists we have now fail because they allow too many exceptions.
I put my home phone number and my cell phone number on the Do-Not-Call List and I've been getting an increasingly high amount of calls since then. I never got a single telemarketing call on my cell phone before, now I get that annoying 000-000-0000 foghorn "This is your captain!" cruise call multiple times a week. They called three times yesterday on my home phone. I should have known before I added my number, especially my cell phone number, that some con artists would get their hands on the list and exploit it (because if you aren't going to follow the law, who wouldn't want a nice, cheap list of active numbers?). I don't understand how caller ID works, but why can't the telephone companies (ex. Bell) do something about these calls coming from non-existent numbers like 123-456-7890 and 000-000-0000?
I get that call on all three of my phones about twice a week. All since I put the number son the DNCL. Whats worse they have a habit of calling very early in the morning. So if your hung over in bed and the phone rings and being alseep you pick it up without seeing the number your poor little head gets blasted by that fucking Foghorn. Neither Telus or Rogers will block it and the people at the DNCL are useless.
...CANREG, the Canadian domain registry, is the only organization that I can prove sold or somehow leaked my email address to spammers.
Simple. Class action lawsuit against CTRC. Creates incentive for latter institution to design a system that cannot be foreseeably stolen by any old worker in the organization. Make them liable for the tort actions of their employees (standard Canadian law), and impose huge damages. Then watch how CTRC takes measures to avoid this in the future. If they don't, sue them again for negligence (as soon as the first old granny gets scammed or loses money through the actions of one of the list purchasers).
Needs more mountweazels!
I get a dozen calls from these idiots a day. only thing is that i don't ever have to answer a single telemarketing call. i have an PbxInAFlash box (http://pbxinaflash.net) that sits between my pots line and my phone. When you call, your caller id is looked up against a shared list, much like rbl, and if its blacklisted you get disconnect tones and hang up. if your not on the list, and you havent been white listed, you must still prove that you are a human by dialing an extension number that changes per call. If you prove your a human by pressing the right extension, you get to talk to me. There is however always an extension that announces as "if you are a telemarketer please press 1 for immediate service. pressing 1 or failing to press anything, dumps you into telemarketer hell. an announcement of "your call is important to you, please hold and your call will be ignored in the order in which it was received." then you get elevator music for a while, and another announcement comes on" please continue to hold, you are number (some large random number) in the cue and the estimated wait time is 99:99 minutes" evil, but highly effective
A U.S. telemarketer pays nothing like "international" call rates to Canada. They probably pay exactly the same rate they'd pay to call any U.S. number. At home, I'm on a plan where all calls within U.S. *and* Canada are "free".
We live in the US and have always been on the DNC list and we get hammered nevertheless. Especially around dinnertime. The DNC is ineffectual and I have concluded that being on it makes you a special target.
This is like the recent subway stabbing in Toronto, which made front-page-news, because it is so rare. In US cities it's commonplace, and hushed up (no reporting) so as not to drag down speculative real estate values and foreign investment.
And they're not exactly bright telemarketers either. After several of their calls where I just hung up, I decided to answer their survey with bogus information and then talk to someone in person. I asked who they represented, and then mentioned some company (can't even remember the name now). After explaining to them I didn't wish to be contacted and I was on the Canadian DNC list, they still call back from time to time. When we see the 000-000-0000 number (or any other similarly obvious number like 012-345-6789) on the call display we just don't bother picking up. Hope someone finally makes a phone capable of white-listing calls. Anyone know if such a thing exists?
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Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I always thought it would be better if they had a way of submitting names/phone #'s in a standardized format to a webpage that would verify they're legit to call.
Like when you're checking a password against a hash, the submitter never sees a plain password (or in this case a phone #), only whether or not it's accepted.
Heck, you could do something similar with data on a CD/DVD-ROM of actually MD5'ed #'s with a quick lookup app to check them.
I do not recall registering with this registry. However, I am 100% sure I started to get these phone calls ("hello, this is your captain speaking") ever since I registered with cruisemates.com
As far as I can tell, they are a front for collecting this kind of information.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell