Free Republic

NRI entrepreneur flays NYT over 'smear campaign Vinod 'Vin' Gupta, 60, the multi-millionaire chairman and CEO of infoUSA and focus of a major article in the New York Times in the Washington Post on May 26 regarding a lawsuit that brands his using the company's private jet to fly former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on personal, business and campaign trips as a 'waste of corporate assets,' has said it's all an effort to embarrass Hillary Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. infoUSA is one of America's leading marketing information companies that provide electronic, print...

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...

Instead of hanging up on a telemarketer trying to sell you a subscription to the local newspaper, let them know what you think of the local newspaper. Tell the telemarketer that you will not subscribe because the newspaper is on the side of the homophobic, anti woman, anti free speech Islamic Terrorists who wish to force free people to blah blah blah Be creative. Catalog the defeatist attitude of the media in general. Mention the Mil Bloggers. Mention the failure of the media to report the good news from Iraq & Afghanistan, etc etc etc Keep it funny, keep it...

Mark Gibbs is one the best commentators on Network World via "Gearhead" and "Backspin", plus he answers my emails from time to time. From his Blogg on NW is a link to one of the funniest audio recordings I have ever heard. I thought I had some great replies to telemarketeers, but this wins outright. Listen and enjoy.

This year's heavy volume of automated political phone calls has infuriated countless voters and triggered sharp complaints from Democrats, who say the Republican Party has crossed the line in bombarding households with recorded attacks on candidates in tight House races nationwide.... An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls. Pamela Lorenz, a retired nurse in Roseville, Calif., called her own experience "harassment as far as I'm concerned" and said,...

CONCORD, N.H. -- The National Republican Congressional Committee acknowledges that its automated phone program on behalf of a local congressman may violate New Hampshire law, but said that it would continue, despite opposition from local party leaders. Two complaints filed with the state attorney general's office Friday accused the congressional committee of violating state law by directing automated phone calls to those on the federal Do Not Call Registry....

Firm to pay $5.35 million in FTC's largest civil penalty protecting consumers. Updated: 11:46 a.m. ET Dec. 13, 2005 WASHINGTON - DirecTV Inc. will pay $5.35 million to settle charges that its telemarketers called households listed on the national do-not-call registry to pitch satellite TV programming, Federal Trade Commission officials said Tuesday. The proposed settlement, if approved by a federal judge in Los Angeles, would be the FTC’s largest civil penalty in a consumer protection case. The DirecTV complaint, filed by the Department of Justice at the FTC’s request, named the company and five telemarketing firms it hired, as well...

A new government could spell the end of many telephone sales approaches, but humanitarian organizations will in any event be allowed to try to raise funds.The Socialist Left Party (SV) has proposed strict regulation of telemarketing, and potential coalition partner Labor is willing to consider tougher measures, newspaper Bergens Tidende reports.Current Minister of Children and Family Affairs Laila Dåvøy, a Christian Democrat, agrees that something should be done."I see that this has become a big problem for many people and this is particularly because the right to deny approaches has not worked properly. Even if the telephone subscriber has registered...

Received this in a marketing newsletter Live From Chicago: ABA Raises the Bar on Telemarketing The American Bar Association is considering testing direct mail and telephone scripts that strongly encourage credit card payment to boost membership renewal rates. The ABA is the largest volunteer professional association in the country, with 400,000 members, including 300,000 attorneys. Lawyers are offered a free one-year membership when the pass the bar exam; after the first year when payment is requested, retention is about 40%. Membership levels are crucial, said Roger Marcus, the ABA's director of database marketing at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing's...

Beginning Feb 6, 2005, dozens of homes and individuals in the Washington D.C. area have been bombarded by phone calls with recorded messages that apparently come from China's Communist regime. The messages contain propaganda, demonizing the practice of "Falun Gong,” and claiming the Chinese Government is defending "human rights” by "saving” people from the Chinese spiritual practice. The curious and remarkably benign target of the phone campaign, Falun Gong, also known as "Falun Dafa,” is a spiritual practice that consists of gentle exercises and postures, combined with a meditation component. Three values - truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance - form the...

El Paso Police Investigating Phone Call UPDATED: 8:41 AM EST December 8, 2004 A Detroit-area woman received a threatening letter in the mail after hanging up on a telemarketer calling from Texas, according to Detroit TV station WDIV. TELEMARKETER THREAT Video: Woman Describes Telemarketing Threat How Do You Handle Telemarketers? Read Threatening Letter Jill Beyer, of Waterford Township, Mich., said she received the letter about one week after she refused to donate money in a recent call from a telemarketer. "He wanted a donation for the veterans' association, which the veterans don't get that much of that money. That's why...

About 66 million Americans have signed up for the national Do Not Call Registry, resoundingly declaring their desire not to be bothered by telemarketers. "It's been a wild success," acknowledged Allen Hile, a spokesman for the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. So why mess with it? That's what the FTC says it may do in response to a petition from Voice Mail Broadcasting Corp., a Southern California direct-marketing firm that specializes in blitzing consumers with prerecorded phone messages. The company argues that the Federal Communications Commission allows such calls under certain circumstances, which is true, and that all it wants...

Telemarketers will soon have access to your cell phone number. This spring, all cell phone numbers will be put into a directory. The good news is, you do not have to worry about losing your friend's cell phone number. The bad news is, telemarketers will be calling your phone and using up your minutes. "It would be an option if you wanted to be in a directory or not. There could be some advantages - some people are virtually unreachable. About 5% of the cell phone users don't have a land line listing anywhere, so you lose your friends cell...

My Week [Translated from German] This week I was called by a woman employee of a credit card company. She asked me whether I mean testicles to insure wanted. I had straight lamb chops in the pan, when the telephone rang. The woman employee had an easily Frankish accent. It rolled R. I noticed that, when she said "Prostata". It began not with the testicles, but more generally. I am, said her knowing, already accident-insured and also in any way in the best way took certainly precautions. Now however offer the map for particularly good customers a very attractive product....

WASHINGTON--U.S. regulators said Tuesday they had sued a Las Vegas telemarketing company, the first time the government has gone to court seeking fines for violations of the Do Not Call Registry. The suit, filed in federal court in Nevada, charges Braglia Marketing Group with making more than 300,000 telephone calls to people on the Do Not Call Registry, the Federal Trade Commission said.

Europe and America are worlds apart when it comes to privacy laws. Privacy is a constitutional right in all European Union countries, which zealously safeguard personal information about their citizens. Each has its own data protection commissioner, a privacy watchdog roughly equivalent to the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. ...in the United States, people are accustomed to giving out personal information, such as their Social Security number, on all manner of documents. And credit information is collected, sliced and diced by major corporations that use it as part of a relentless stream of marketing. "The...

Excuse Software set to revolutionise user experience ASC TELECOMS has introduced an exciting new application to help call centres fob us off with glib answers more efficiently. Here's how TheInquirer.net interprets the claims made by ASC's marketing manager Maria Boxley. The SmartContact Centre, supplied by ASC to customers like British Gas and Vertex, helps call centre workers to collaborate more efficiently, heightening their ability to either bother you or think up excuses to fend off your awkward questions. Say a call centre worker finds a caller on the line who is about to go postal. Maybe it's a British Gas...

<p>As a state assemblywoman in 2001, Elaine Alquist voted for "do-not-call" legislation to shield Californians from annoying telemarketing calls. But Thursday, in the midst of a bid for the state Senate, Alquist's campaign deluged about 13,000 Santa Clara County households with a 7 a.m. wake-up call -- seeking votes in the March 2 primary election.</p>

Washington-AP -- If you have Caller ID, take a look at it starting tomorrow when the phone rings -- and you'll know if a telemarketer is calling. Federal regulations requiring telemarketing firms to identify themselves kick in tomorrow. Up until now, telemarketing calls had shown up on Caller ID as "out of area." But either the name of the company trying to make a sale or the firm making the call now has to pop up -- along with a phone number customers can call to tell the company to stop calling. The new regulations are part of the...

The telecommunications industry, eager to find a route around a 100-year-old regulatory regime, has turned to a new path: the Internet. In the month since a federal court in Minnesota ruled that calls delivered over the Internet are not subject to state regulation, Qwest Communications International Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and SBC Communications Inc. have announced intentions to beef up their ability to deliver phone calls over their data networks. The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) traditionally has had a hands-off policy when it comes to regulating the Internet. But on Monday, it will hold its first hearing...