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"Do Not Call" Violators Fined $1.2M
coondoggie writes "A federal court today spanked two telemarketers with some $1.2 million in civil penalties for violating the Federal Trade Commission's Do Not Call Rule. According to the FTC, the companies called consumers whose phone numbers were on the Do Not Call Registry without having obtained their express written agreement or having an 'established business relationship' with them. One group's telemarketers also allegedly abandoned many calls, by failing to connect the calls to a sales representative within two seconds after consumers answered, as required by law, the FTC stated. The cases were filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC."
...don't think the telemarketers didn't factor fines like this in the price they charged clients.
This is $300 billion/year industry.
THL phish sticks
Many judges are not sympathetic towards people who report the "Do Not Call" violators. They see the people who do report them as whiny people who are abusing the judicial system for money.
Telemarketing, Spamming, and even Billboards, are what I call bad advertising. They advertise without giving any advantage to the community or benefit to the end user, or costs them in some ways.
Advertising that helps offer free services, or reduced cost services are good advertising, wither or not this happens is at the ethics of the person giving the service, but not the advertiser.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If anyone deserves a repeat spanking it's these people. I have to deal with enough marketing crap coming via my inbox & letterbox without having people call my phone all the time too. It's especially galling when people have explicitly indicated that they don't want to be called in the first place, as they have here.
I wish the whole concept of telemarketing would just die a horrible death. Who really wants to deal with persistent salespeople when they're trying to chill out at home and enjoy the precious little time that isn't spent staring at their work PC?
More spanking please.
From what I can tell, this decision is actually a blow to so-called "fine print" "privacy policies" and "terms and conditions" so prevalent on websites these days. In the article, it says that they were convicted even though their "fine print" said the consumers would receive marketing calls. It sounds like to me that those types of one-sided "fine print" contracts are not being upheld in court.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I have a Virgin Mobile that I've been using now for nearly a year and I still get calls from all sorts of telemarketers who refuse to stop calling me, claiming I owe money or that my car warranty is about to expire. I recently made a report on one of these companies whose robo calls filled up my voice mail, only to recieve a letter back saying the report was 'unfounded' and wishing me a nice day. So while I'm happy to see there has been some action taken here against some of these companies I wish they'd be more consistent in enforcement.
The other thing that bothers me is the increasing frequency of these types of calls coming over VOIP and their increasing similarity to spam. My fear is that unless we get consistent in enforcement we're going to end up with today's situation with email repeated on cellphones, just as it was on faxes and landlines.
--happy one
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
>>> failing to connect the calls to a sales representative within two seconds after consumers answered, as required by law,
This happens to me a LOT, but I didn't realize it was required by law to answer. That's good. There's nothing more annoying than running to get the phone, and only hearing a bunch of clicks and nobody answering. Stupid corporations should be forced out of business, not just fined. With workers being fired left-and-right, maybe a few of these law-breaking corporations should be "fired" too.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Unless those 1.2m are a sizable portion of the revenue (read: enough to make it unprofitable), it is just a cost factor, not a fine. A fine has to discourage. Unless the fine is actually high enough to make the illegal business unprofitable, it will not stop people doing this kind of business.
Example: You run a scam that cheats people out of 100 bucks each. When you get caught, you have to pay 50 bucks per person scammed as a fine. Question: Do you stop scamming, or is those 50 bucks just the cost factor to take into account for your next run?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If bugging people on the phone at dinner time is a crime then my gran owes me ALOT of money then :)
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Most of the "really guilty" companies use VOIP with callerid spoofing. It's illegal but almost impossible to prove on a sweeping scan of the industry. You have to watch one company to catch them doing it and most of these guys switch their names, change location etc... and often times aren't even in the United States and thus, not under their jurisdiction.
- I don't want the Government to be able to wiretap companies without a warrant.
- I don't want the telephone companies / ISP's filtering content.
- We can't punish the companies who use them because it could easily be used as a bankrupting tool for innocent companies (company A wants to bankrupt company b and "hires" telemarketing company as company A).
- I refuse to pay my telephone company or the government more money for something that should be happening in the first place
So how do we stop these guys especially when we can't prosecute them under our laws?
Solutions
1) Filters - You can have automatic private/unknown block. I know two people who have private numbers who would have trouble calling me. This is flawed because you block people you want to talk to and callerID spoofing bypasses the rest. If it comes to traffic identification that means ISPS are scanning traffic... uh NO. No matter what you basically you hurt yourself here.
2) Fines - won't work on the really bad ones outside the US. A pointless endeavor except to inside the US.
Sure the above two work to deter it within our Country... however I think jail-time of the company owners should be mandatory. That would pretty much stop it within the US. However... it's pretty minor here. Most calls you get are from out of country.
Here is my solution... but its easier said than done due to difficulty of implementation. The requirements are the follows
1) Create a complaint system where users can do *123 (or something) that identifies that call as an unwanted sales call.
2) Users who have access to this feature must be on the DO NOT CALL LIST
3) This system must be profitable for all those involved or negligible in cost or it's a pipe dream.
4) There has to be a bit of leeway because lists are purchased and occasionally even the best companies screw up.
When a caller identifies a call by hitting *123 it flags that call for the telephony company. It stores the data of that caller in a database. This database is given to a US agency who runs reports identifying repeat offenders or "areas" of the world where it comes from the most (including the US).
This helps the US target those areas and identify the companies that relay those calls, or that companies VOIP id's etc. From this information we can block them entirely. Like all blacklists there has to be a measure of care taken before someone is placed on it.
Good exploiters of the system are constantly moving, constantly changing to not be identified. Here's what the cherry in my plan comes from. When telemarketers like this are identified, it's almost a shoe in to identify the companies that do business with them. Begin to fine those companies. WHY?!?
When companies begin to get hit with fines, and the threat of being identified as "bad marketers" receiving bad media... you bet your ass they'll start looking for more reputable marketing groups. You'll see a SHARP decline in the number of unwanted calls that occur.
Unfortunately this is a long term solution and would take over a year to begin culling the data and identifying trends. Except one thing...
AT&T, Sprint and several others have been doing this for years. They have the data, they know who it is... all they need is little push from a Governmental agency dedicated to spam! The fines and such would self manage this agency. When fines are high this agencies focus is here... when it's low this agency can focus on other issues.
The best part is that when this problem becomes small... so will the governmental agency.
My perfect world i guess...
I do that on my home phone line (actually even simpler than that -- "Press 1 to continue in English"), and it works quite well.
Now if they can just get the idiots that call me and tell me my car warranty is about to expire on a regular basis, despite me repeatedly telling them to take me off their list AND my phone number being on the do-not-call registry, I'd be happy.
I toggled a toggle and buttoned a button, but when I got done, I was done doin' nothin'.
I get them a couple of times a week. They're robo calls, with the usual "press 1 to ..." and they all start with the claim to help you with your CC rates and that this is "your last chance".
Once, I played them. I pressed 1. Said I was interested. Was asked if I had "at least $4000 in CC debt." Once I passed that test, I was handled off to the closer, a really slick asshole who asked for my CC#'s. I stalled. He waited. I acted dumb and said I'd look for my statements. I just set down the phone. 10 minutes later I hung up. I immediately got a call back. At first, he thought I accidentally hung up, but I hung up again. He called back again and before I hung up again I hear "you'll be sorry..." The next 5 rings were people that asked to be taken off their list. I had to take the phone off the hook for 30 minutes.
...and I've gotten robocalls on my cell, too, saying my car warranty was going to expire.
If, as you say, you have to have someone actually on the line, then no, they're not legal.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
This is your second notice that the warranty on your annoying telephone scam is about to expire.