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Dish Network Violated Do-Not-Call 57 Million Times
lightbox32 writes Dish Network has been found guilty of violating the Do Not Call list on 57 million separate occasions. They were also found liable for abandoning or causing telemarketers to abandon nearly 50 million outbound telephone calls, in violation of the abandoned-call provision of the Federal Trade Commission's Telemarketing Sales Rule. Penalties for infringing on the Do Not Call list can be up to a whopping $16,000 for each outbound call.
Deesh you have been a very bad monkey.
US deficit problem SOLVED!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This will continue until the principals in the companies are either sent to jail, castrated, or both. Fines don't seem to work, in the rare cases where any are imposed.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Violation!
Assuming maximum penalty for all calls.
"Do you take card?"
Does this mean they will be gutting the company, "selling" the assets and beginning anew as several smaller firms that will later merge into one?
Which is the ability to inflict pain on the telemarketing fraudsters.
Seriously, is it too much to ask for a license to kill? I promise to use it responsibly!
Book it as revenue. Declare the budget balanced. Sell the stock when the news hits the markets. Sell the company and skip town. Wait... it is US Govt right? It has already been sold to the highest bidder, right! Dang it, I knew I would hit a snag somewhere.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Don't make promises you can't keep. Even if you have no intention of keeping them.
I have discontinued their service ages ago, but without fail they keep pelting me with junk mail. Is this company selling international TV streams via dishworld.com?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At one point, starting in 2011 (and possibly still), DISH had an entire team of about 30 call center agents in their Littleton call center dedicated to astroturfing - hyping DISH products and services, sometimes disclosing their employment, sometimes not... and each agent was required to make at least 22 posts a day.
Nice knowing you, Dish.
you're grammar are atrocious !
As penalty, since per instance, the fine would be just shy of $1 Trillion, they forfeit all of their spectrum rights.
It's futile to have the fines, and rules, if they aren't enforced
"Are you recording this, or can you set a flag that will cause this call to be flagged for review? Do it now."
"You're calling because I have a listed phone at an address that used to have Dish Network. Yes, there is a Dish dish on the roof; two of them in fact. Despite asking you not to call, you keep calling on average every two weeks. Clearly you hope that those dishes will be turned on again right now. There is no chance of that, but if you call again here's what will happen. I will climb onto the roof and unbolt both dishes, then toss them over the edge onto the driveway. Then I will bust them apart with a sledgehammer and set fire to what parts can burn. Then I will put out the fire by pissing on it. I will save a souvenir, something with the Dish logo on it, and plant it on a pike in my front yard as a warning to Dish sales representatives. Or if you stop calling it the dishes can stay up there and wait for the next tenant. For the last time, please don't call again. Got it?"
I got a laugh from the lady representative and she said 'Got it!"
They didn't call again.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I've received all kinds of mail from them and DirectTV, but I've never got a call from them or Dish Network and I've never heard any complaints of people receiving calls from either. On the other hand I get all kinds of calls from car warranty and home security companies.
Most of the calls are from telemarketing companies that sell Dish, not Dish themselves. I work for an authorized, small local company that sells and installs Dish (and DTV). As we see it, the biggest problem in the industry is telemarketers that sell the systems and then don't care at all about the customer. These unethical companies are the ones breaking the laws, but Dish looks the other way as long as they are sending them lots of business.
The sad thing is, it is very possible Dish will do away with all retailers to help fix this problem, and the small, ethical, local retailers will get thrown out in the wash... This is the complete livelihood for the 5 of us that own and work at our company. We handle some large accts like our state capital, entire state prison system, state University medical center (to name just a few). My boss has built a great little company, it will be very sad to see it taken away as a result of this. This is actually quite scary, we all have over 15 years of our lives invested in this company.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I believe it. They have been bad on all 3 fronts: mail, phone, and email. Give them a throw-away email address, use the main line at work (or something). Got a PO Box for billing? Use it! The service doesn't generally need to know where you live although that can complicate installation. Back in the day, I would handpoint my own dish using the signal strength indicator on the TV as a feedback.
I recall sending annual unsubscribe emails with a cc to canspam@uce.gov (or whatever that address was). Useless. You had to get on the phone and bitch your way to a supervisor's supervisor/manager. That might work for a little while.
I think the problem only went away because of
a) cord cutting (internet only instead of dish/cable)
b) no more land line at my home
c) abandoned email addresses
I'm a hardline libertarian, anarcho-capitalist/voluntaryist, but this turned my stomach.
In its 238-page ruling, the District Court for the Central District of Illinois found that Dish Network called over one million phone numbers that were registered either on Dish Network’s own website as Do Not Calls, or that were marked as “DNC” by telemarketing vendors.
Argh. After they say they are calling in regards to my card ending in "...1234" I ask them to identify the bank, at which point they balk.
Likewise, when scammers call me up about my [insert model year] [insert make] [insert model] and how my warranty is up, I ask them to name my warranty company (I know the exact terms and the company, having dealt with them a few times already), to which they have no answer. The last one got angry and hung up after I lectured her on scamming people.
As far as I'm concerned, I fully support the use of our Predator Drone program to identify, locate, and destroy these call centers (who are most certainly not calling from anywhere in the US, let alone near the area code spoofed on my caller id)
I can keep it. I just need the money to find the A-Team.
Fine them to the max and if they shut down, they shut down. That will wake up the rest of the corps that do this.
I'm sorry, I don't get it.
You seem to be implying that I should care that you, an admitted telemarketer, might be put out of a job along with four others.
I just don't understand your position.
I believe his post indicates he is an installer, not a telemarketer. Huge difference as he would be the guy climbing on the roof for people who do want DISH's service.
See what happens when you mess with Fox network?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It likely isn't just DISH. I registered years ago with the national do-not-call list years ago and things have always been rather quiet. However, since last year, the number of nuisance calls to my home has increased dramatically. I'd first chalked it up the the elections. But even after the elections were over, the calls kept coming. Sometimes the numbers are spoofed, sometimes its "dead air", sometimes its a recorded message, but they all qualify as the type of unwanted calls the DNC list was supposed to protect us from. A few have confirmed their own similar experience when I complained about my problem on reddit. Does anyone know what the hell is going on with this thing? I'm sure where there is smoke there is fire.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Until they automate, or at least expedite, the process of a consumer getting fines/money back from the telemarketers and corporations using laws already on the books, this whole DNC thing is meaningless. (Note, all the tools necessary to do this are already in place in some form or another) But that will never happen so truly DNC is, and always has been, a worthless thing.
Where did I say anywhere that we were telemarketers? I stated telemarketers are the "bad guys" .Word of mouth is our best advertising.
My point is, we have played by the rules, care for our customers, don't telemarket or anything like it (door to door etc.) and we are in jeopardy of loosing our business because of the ass hole telemarketers.
As for a car analogy, go step in front of a bus, preferably while it is moving.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Wife bought a car, xm called upto 4 time per day trying to get us to subscribe once the free trial ran out. We flat out said we are not interested stop calling and 15 minutes later they would call back.
Whoopdy do. They spend $500 on a new incorporation, or fifty, divide assets and fold the one arm left holding the bag. Problem solved at a cost of nearly nothing.
Is that the phone company is allowed to let callers lie about their identity via caller ID.
If all commercial calls could be incontrovertibly tied to corporate officers, a lot of this nonsense would end quickly.
DISH has a market cap of $16 billion. I say fine them enough to seriously hurt them (a billion?) and use the money to buy resources to go after and shut down all the other offenders.
Despite the fact that dish Network is superior to 99% of the telemarketing companies due to the fact that Dish network actually delivers a product instead of simply taking your money and delivering nothing they are the ones that get hammered by the law. The sick part of this is that the DOJ prosecutes only a dozen or so telemarketing companies a year and they go after the ones that can pay large fines exclusively. That leaves the merry bands of thireves who are less succesful free to keep ripping people off endlessly. And unlike other issues this one is easy to solve. Each town should advertise to get homes that voluntier to be honey pots that record each and every phone call into the home. That way they could raid every telemarketing room in the US if any laws are broken at all in the solicitation. Usually the people who actually do the calling are not aware that they are commiting major crimes. The managers and owners are the ones that need to be in prisons. I've even seen an unskilled and unkowning grandma made the room manger as the room new they would be raided. The old woman had no clue and was convicted of felonies. One Nation Under God With Idiocy And Injustice For All.
I don't have caller id - I've saved multiple thousands of dollars by not adding it to my (*cough*) land line service.
Of course, I never answer that line either... it is for receiving (*cough*) faxes, and making outgoing calls.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My assumption, since the entire country has been annoyed at Rachel and her ilk for years, and since the FBI could easily get warrants to search for her even if the NSA didn't pwn the phone companies, is that either
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
95-99% of the calls to my home phone are from robots. Some are friendly robots ("Your prescription is ready at CVS"), most are spammer robots. I finally got fed up and put the number on the Do Not Call List, and the main change has been that more robots call me and either don't play a recording at all, or else play a recording but if I press "1" to talk to their human, never connect me to a human. (And I almost always tell them I want to; usually I'll put the phone down, sometimes I'll chew them out, often I'll put the phone down and if somebody answers, I'll say "hello" and then put the phone down.)
Back when I used to design call center equipment, in the 80s, phone calls cost more per minute than operators. These days that's totally changed, so it doesn't cost them much to make calls and abandon them if they don't have a spare operator within a few seconds; it's not like they're worried about losing repeat business.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Take the company out of share holders hand, put in a new board of directors and sell it to someone else to pay off the fines.
Court: Dish, you've been bad.
Dish: Ouch! My wrist!
Dish equity holders: Thank you, Court. The check is in the mail.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
.. Comcast conveniently ratted them out. Now there are no heroes in this story.
...then one day i got a telemarketing call trying to sell me dish service (which as i just mentioned i already had)
I immediately called them up & canceled service, complaining that i refuse to do business with telemarketers or companies that support them.
Fuck Dish network.
Dish Network stock has been going up lately, isn't that crazy
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Dish installations often put a number of holes through the roofs, and water damage often follows behind. How many of those installations now have messed up roofs?
Though it's true that there are a LOT of criminal minded call centers it does not mean they are all that way. Every company that uses a phone to sell is considered a call center. But the criminally minded ones makes so much noise that the industry as a whole look like a really bad idea.
Which begs the question what really makes a person turn criminal and rip others off?
Usually it's the idea that they cannot deliver an honest day's production. The crime is an unusual solution, a not so bright idea on how to get around the problem, in short. The standard solution is to get a job performing some action. The person decides that's not really doable, may it be because of not feeling skilled or competent enough, or maybe because of having some warped idea of their own esteemed value and feel it below them to actually work. At that point it's a downward spiral.
Take a little kid. They all want to contribute. If you let them they will probably grow up ready to do an honest days work. If not you put them on a path of criminal think. What would you do if you could not keep up with kids in school? Work harder studying? When the kid start to feel disassociated from society they disaccociate from society and go their own way. That's how gangs are formed. Which is why it's so important to help kids in school.
So there's the real solution to telmerketers pestering you. Help each and every kid contribute from an early age and don't let them fall behind in school. Not by using force because that's a wate of time. But by being in communication with understanding with each child. Never talk down to a child, that only shows how poor your control of the situation is and is not helping the child. They are real persons with still growing bodies. Talk with them as adults.
I used to get junk faxes from Disk Network affiliates all the time. So them moving to bad telemarketing just seem like business-as-usual for them in my opinion.
How much power would you have to transmit to damage a satellite?
I told everybody you can't rely on the "Do not call" nonsense. All it does is put your name on another list.
Good. Put them out of business once and for all.
As someone who gets 2-4 pre-recorded calls a day on his cell phone (that has been registered on DoNotCall) I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the FCC. If you look through their settlements page you'll see that in the rare instance they prosecute a case they invariably settle for whatever profits were made by the criminal. No jail time, no seizing of all personal assets. This is akin to making a thief put back what they stole as punishment. It's no wonder these robo-calling scum keep doing what they do.
What's galling is that the FCC prosecutors have their cases made for them. Hundreds if not thousands of people attest to having received calls from x number on x date promising x services by filing complaints at FCC.gov. It's a slam dunk. Yet the useless fucks are so ineffectual that the crooks have no reason not to keep trying.
Not yet anyway.
I yearn for an age where I can live without a phone. But friends and relatives still use them :(
If the dish is installed properly, it doesn't damage the roof. It is more about cheap install companies that do crappy work, not a systemic problem.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I'm just curious, is that the actual amount? $57 only? If that's the case they saved a but load of money! Then they only owe $2,964,000,000
No, the total fine for all the calls will be closer to $57 than $0.912 billion. I will be surprised if the fine exceeds $1m.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Expect your prices to go up in direct proportion to any fines levied.
There are legitimate reasons for doing it. Businesses which essentially have the telephone equivalent of a NAT (lots of inside lines, only a few incoming numbers), or forwarding etc.
People with VOIP lines may have only an outgoing line with no number to call back. I've had this and used my cellular # for call-display.
That said, there should be a way to authorize or verify numbers for caller-ID purposes, perhaps by sending a text message or confirmation call with a passcode. Then, only those who have registered a number can use it for caller-ID purposes.
What's that, the fine exceeds the company's market cap?
In that case, cancel all their outstanding stock, and have the government issue new stock shares for sale. The government gets to keep the proceeds of the stock sale, and the new owners can have a shareholders meeting to figure out what to do with the company now.
I worked for a grey market company in Canada about 15 years ago where Canadians would subscribe and use u.s. mailboxes.
We'd change their Canadian phone number area code to Washington for easy system.
At one point, a customers account was disabled due to non-payment. When we investigated, the customer was called by dish to off starz/encore and the extra $10/month wasn't being paid because we didn't know.
They called his area code 604 number. When we called dish, they still had the area code as 509.
So they were going by receivers that bought ppv's that called into dish and dish went by that list instead of actual phone number on the account.
Yes, dtv and dish knew they had sizeable Canadian customers for years.
I wouldn't worry about Dish even in the worst case scenarion. Here's how it would go down:
FCC: You violated Do Not Call 57 million times. Times $16,000 per, that's, lessee...
Dish: I can't afford that! I guess we're bamkrupt. :(
FCC: Ohwell, sux 2 B U!
FCC: No, sux to be you!
FCC: Whaaaaaaa???
AFCC: Yes, when assigning spectrum, we promised Congress there would always be at least two satellite cable networks.
FCC: Rats!
Dish: Ha ha!
FCC: Yeah, ha ha!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This was back before the World Wide Web, when call centers were primarily toll-free numbers that you called to get information from companies, make airline reservations, etc. It was either people you wanted to talk to, or people you had to call anyway like the electric company.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Dish have been spamming various addresses of mine for over a decade.
They're unrepentant recidivists and deserve to be taken out of business.
Congress needs to pass legislation that limits any phone, email, and fax interaction solely on an opt-in basis and opt-out requests need to be handled within a day (not this "you will be removed from our mailing list in 6-8 weeks"). This needs to include political campaigns as well. The only exception is reverse 911 for obvious reasons.
Fines big enough to cause a shareholder revolt will have a lasting effect
Um no. Most of these companies voting stocks are controlled by company insiders these days. OR the company is so huge, even 8 figure fines don't put a dent the companies earnings to bother anyone rich enough to own enough shares to start a shareholder revolt. The modern "public" stock market is broken.
It would be much better to put the "interchangeable" people in a real jail for a meaningful amount of time. To put the fear of god into their replacements. Do it enough times....
When telemarketers start being publicly executed by firing squad for DNC violations, maybe then they'll start taking notice.
Problem is - overseas call centers using spoofed CLID tables and SIP trunks to the United States that are beyond the reach of state and federal law. Not a thing we can do about it. Anyone with a few years experience with a PBX knowledge of SIP trunks or PRI's can figure this out easily. Hardware is cheap, software is freely available.
wha...t? Why is it so much lower? How did that number change so drastically?
because if their fine was higher, they would close up shop and go into some other business. it's the only way they will keep on "serving" their customers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!