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FTC Targets Group That Made Billions of Robocalls
coondoggie writes Given the amount of time the FTC and others have put into curing the robocall problem, it is disheartening to hear that a group of companies for almost a year have been making billions of illegal robocalls. The Federal Trade Commission and 10 state attorneys general today said they have settled charges against a Florida-based cruise line company and seven other companies that averaged 12 million to 15 million illegal sales calls a day between October 2011 through July 2012, according to the joint complaint filed by the FTC and the states.
However as is typical in these cases, while the settlement imposes a civil penalty of $7.73 million against CCL, it will be partially suspended after CCL pays only $500,000. Other companies involved such as Linked Service Solutions got a $5 million civil penalty but will only be required to pay $25,000.
Why does government even pretend to work for us?
Telemarketing doesn't poison the NSA database anymore than spam email poisons an email account with a good spam filter. Spam, whether tele or email, is highly centralized. It's trivial to ignore for those guys.
Which reminds me, it's about time that phones get a filtering solution.
I don't get cruise sales calls -- I get calls for carpet cleaning, construction contracting, phony IRS agents, and phony credit agencies. I suspect many are calling from foreign countries. They obviously aren't deterred one whit by US laws or agencies. I just use a box to screen everything unless it's on a whitelist. And blacklisted calls get a disconnected number signal. For the most part, problem solved but I can see from the call logs who's tried and what scam they are pulling by googling the number. What I wonder is, why haven't we seen a massive bust of robocall scammers by the FBI? A couple of reasons-- one, they're not in the US, two, they're paying for the call, so the phone company is making money off them, and three, rich people are mostly unaffected by and/or oblivious of the problem.
Yes, if you press 1 you'll eventually get connected to a soulless husk that was formerly human but now is unable to feel warmth. They're also pretty quick to hang up, so I just shout at them.
bah.