Posted on 06/08/2007 7:45:48 AM PDT by SmithL
Paul Burnett enjoyed four years with almost no calls from telemarketers. That is, until Saturday.
The 64-year-old Alameda man is among more than 100 million Americans registered with the National Do Not Call Registry, which bans most telemarketing calls to people on the list.
The automated message Saturday sounded liked it was from a local carpet cleaning company. When Burnett tried to call the company back, the phone number wouldn't accept incoming calls.
Instead of shrugging it off as a minor annoyance, he filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and posted the company's phone number on http://www.800notes.com, a privately run database of suspected illegal telemarketers.
"If you don't fight back, nothing will change," Burnett said. "If you do fight back, something might happen. The statistics are with the people who complain."
Not content with complaining to the government, a small group of citizens has taken it upon themselves to personally punish telemarketers who skirt federal privacy law.
They've published online do-it-yourself kits, with suggestions such as blowing an airhorn into the phone when a telemarketer calls or carefully gathering evidence to build successful lawsuits against telemarketing schemes.
Last year, roughly 375,000 Americans filed 1.1 million complaints with the Federal Trade Commission about telemarketers. In the four years since the National Do Not Call Registry was launched, the commission has settled 29 cases against the country's worst telemarketing firms.
Bob Arkow, a 56-year-old Santa Clarita phone technician, said he has sued dozens of telemarketing firms in the past decade, collecting about $25,000 in total under the Federal Communications Commission's Telephone Consumer Privacy Act, another federal law regulating telemarketing.
He was one of the first to join the National Do Not Call Registry, and he said he has changed tactics as the number of illegal calls dropped. Instead of suing, these days he tries to waste as much of a telemarketer's time as possible.
"They have a 3 percent success rate," Arkow said. "For every 100 people they call, they had to annoy all these people to get two or three sales. ... If every consumer causes a telemarketer to spend a minute on the phone, the industry will grind to a halt."
An activist in Sacramento launched a blog, http://www.killthecalls.com, after he won $6,160 from three small-claims lawsuits against telemarketers. Filing the suits cost him $195 in court fees and three hours of his time.
"If you think you're getting telemarketing calls illegally, use every resource at your disposal," Federal Trade Commission spokesman Mitch Katz said. "We can't go after every small company in the country. We just don't have the resources for them, because we go after companies that have thousands of complaints against them. But there are a lot of ways you can go about fighting back, if you will."
The Federal Trade Commission isn't the only government agency charged with policing the National Do Not Call Registry. At various times, the Federal Communications Commission and state attorney general's office investigate registry violations.
In the past four years, the state attorney general's office publicized two investigations against telemarketers. It settled one of those lawsuits in 2004 for $100,000.
A spokesman for a telemarketing industry group said most large companies now scrupulously abide by the registry.
The law dealt a heavy blow to traditional telemarketing -- strangers cold calling at dinnertime to sell products and services -- as large telemarketing firms found 40 percent to 50 percent of their contact lists slip away, said Bard Chodera, president of the West Coast chapter of the American Teleservices Association.
The Federal Trade Commission can fine telemarketers as much as $11,000 per illegal call, and have -- notably winning a $5.4 million settlement against DirecTV and several telemarketing firms working for DirecTV. That high-profile case in the early days of the registry made companies take notice.
"Those days (of cold calling) are long gone," Chodera said. "As we like to say, 'Nobody likes to be the lead story on "60 Minutes" anymore.' The companies that I know are absolutely anal about playing totally by the rules. They have full-scale compliance departments, they attend all the compliance seminars and actually overprotect and overscrub their lists."
In the past four years, the big telemarketing firms adapted by scaling back their cold calling sales centers and turning to e-mail and direct mail marketing, Chodera said.
The problem today, he says, is with "renegades" -- like the carpet cleaning service Burnett encountered -- who know the rules but intentionally break them.
By all accounts, the National Do Not Call Registry has been successful in significantly cutting down the number of unsolicited telemarketing phone calls. In a pair of government-commissioned surveys in 2004 and 2005, 92 percent of those polled said they had received fewer telemarketing calls after joining the registry.
But some calls still slip through. And as long as they keep coming to Burnett's house, he'll keep reporting them, even though he knows the government gets inundated with complaints.
"If you don't call or write to these agencies, they won't know that these bad guys are out there," Burnett said. "Folks like myself are the eyes and ears of these agencies, so they have to rely on our reports."
That’s my thought exactly, but when I say that I always hear “But what if it’s an emergency?”
To which I answer:
1) If you need me in an emergency, don’t block your number
2) If you have an emergency, call 9-1-1, not me.
Oh, God, that’s so funny, I just listened to it again and nearly laughed myself into an asthma attack. I need to wipe my eyes now. The best part is when Mabe is pretending he’s going to call the Littleton PD Homicide Division and says, “Now, don’t let that scare you, it’s just a formality.”
Thanks so much for that, now I have it bookmarked so I can have an asthma attack anytime I feel like it! ;-)
I simply turned my fax to manual instead of auto-pickup and every time I got a fax call from a number I did not know I refused to accept the fax. At night I would turn the fax machine off. After three failed attempts they automatically take you off their list.
I tell them, in my best Don Imus voice, to “get off of my phone!”
Works if you want to sit around and listen to the phone ring without answering the call. That tactic doesn't keep them from calling again, it almost ensures that they will keep calling.
We report calls to the DNC registry and answer the phone with a string of colorful language. That usually ticks off the caller so badly that will stop calling (guess they showed us, didn't they?).
Except they say "private," as do a lot of my acquaintances. I'm seriously considering not picking up "private" anymore. My acquaintances will have to talk to the answering machine.
My pleasure. I would LOVE to do that to a phone spammer!
I don't answer 'private' calls - if it's important, they can leave a voice-mail message. And the really important people in my life also have my cell phone number (which I've only given to close friends & family members) for emergencies.
A friend of mine, who is an evangelical Christian, told me that whenever a telemarketer calls he tells them that in order for him to listen to their speech, they have to listen to him for 2 minutes first. When they agree, he starts the converstion with “Do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” At that point the telemarketer will either hang up, or give him a chance to tell about Jesus. He said it is a win/win situation for him.
I bought one of those telezappers too. It reduced my telemarketer calls by 95%. If only I could get the political pre-recorded messages to stop. I used to get non-stop messages on behalf of Baron Hill-D Indiana via a liberal union activist front group telling me to complain to the Republican Mike Sodrel’s office about high gas prices. I kept trying to contact the union to get them to stop harassing me but they don’t accept calls.
“these days he tries to waste as much of a telemarketer’s time as possible.’
My feelings on the efficacy of this can best be expressed in a joke from long ago.
Bob asked Neil to watch over his herd of hogs while Bob was in town. Bob said, “If they get thirsty, you can take them down to the river for a drink.”
“Okay,” said Neil.
When Bob came back later in the day, he found a sweaty, red-faced Neil staggering out of the pig pen carrying a big boar hog.
Neil asked, “What are you doing, Bob?”
“I’m taking the hog down to the river to get a drink, like you said.”
“Well, you could just drive the whole herd down to the river, rather than carrying each pig by itself. Doesn’t it take an awful long time to water the hogs that way?”
“Sure, it takes a long time,” said Bob. “But what’s time to a pig?”
I asked what did he mean. He asked what year I bought my house. I explained that I lived in a rented apartment.
The telemarketer got really upset for some reason, and hung up.
I remember hearing that one recently in a maintnenance training course I was taking a few months ago... Funny as all get out!! That telemarketer never knew what hit him!!
the infowarrior
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