> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List
And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.
I suppose many people would wonder what the difference is between a legitimate caller you don't want and a fake one.
If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference
Also, it depends on the company keeping their word that they won't call you when you are on this list.
Nobody needs or wants these calls, they are always some company wanting to upsell you something you don't really need, they shouldn't be opt-out.
I am not sure why it works so well here. I have vague recollections of news articles about it being ignored in the past. I guess they just struck down hard on those. Also, I imagine if you put yourself on that list you would be really grumpy if someone called to try to sell you something.
I'm guessing (since Norway and Sweden tends to be more similar than different) that Norway also have something similar to the Swedish "Marknadsföringslagen" ("The Marketing Act") that effectively outlaws companies from calling people who obviously don't want to be called. They quite literally get fines if they call people on these lists, hence the companies actively cross-reference against them.
I've worked in cold-calling telemarketing in both Sweden and Spain in my previous life, both companies I worked for were deadly afraid of accidentally calling people on these lists, and actively instructed employees to basically say "Sorry", hang up and flag the number if someone mentioned the name of the lists.
I will never, ever, work with Freshworks, Freshdesk, Freshservice, or any of their other products as a direct result of this.
Most of the people doing cold-calling been trained to listen for the names of the lists, and have strict orders what to do with the number in case someone they call brings it up.
I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
What country are you in that it doesn't work in? I know for a fact it works in Spain and Sweden, but it'll really depend on the country. You'd help by others by being a bit more explicit :)
> I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
That does suck and seems counter-productive indeed! Even more curious what exact country you're talking about now.
Worth knowing for people who might not know; large telemarketing companies have campaigns on the internet to spread FUD about the effectiveness of these lists, so less people enroll. I'm not claiming that you is one of these, but unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country. you could do it by prefix if you wanted to still use the list mechanically, maybe? But the only reason I see for an opt in list is to allow the marketing companies to still exist
... I don't? I'm just want to know what country ferngodfather is talking about, as I'm sure the experience differs a lot by country, made evident by countless of comments in this submission.
> in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country.
I don't disagree with this, but for people suffering from these daily spam calls today, there might be ways to fix that, in a shorter time-frame than "petition the government, then propose a law, then get the law into agreement, then get the law into effect". If we're being clear about what countries people are talking about, there wouldn't be so much FUD about the subject.
Whaaaat? On a American website, driven by a American VC company, are you sure? That has nothing to do with anything in the conversation...
If someone talks about "Most countries" they're not actually talking about some percentage of countries in the world generally, they're specifically talking about "most countries I know about", so when people start being fuzzy about those sort of details, it'd help all of us (not the ones from specific countries) actually understand what's going on and where. For all we know, they could be talking about India, especially since I've already added non-US context with my previous comment they themselves responded to...
Maybe he's in France, since this article is about France having to ban all telemarketing calls since the block lists apparently don't work.
Don't let your regional indignation get in the way of doing basic logic.
How on earth am I supposed to assume they live in France, just because that's in the submission article? Conversations in the comments regularly go beyond the scope of the article, and even the commentator themselves said "Most countries" so clearly they're talking about more than just one.
So it worked for a time, legit companies stoped calling; however most people didn't knew about Bloctel as it was little advertised.
Meanwhile, spam calls turned into scam calls, and a real issue especially with the elderly.
So I think that banning all unsolicited calling kills two birds with one stone, spam becomes illegal and scams as a consequence becomes easier to spot as there are no more unsolicited calls.
And perhaps also (unironically) more persuadable due to the rampant commercialism and historic openness (to ideas, strangers, everything) of their society.
The last few weeks it's been spammy text messages from politicians, though.
Speak with your local politicians to fix the issues that bothers you. They don't listen, out on the streets and protest. Same way civilians communicate with their governments in every other democracy :)
Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.
Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
> You might still be young
I'm almost 40.
Everybody seems to pretend to be black Americans, whose freedoms weren't gained simply by protest, but by being beaten and having dogs sicced on them while protesting before cameras, and the shame that white people felt while watching that on television - and the pressure of "whataboutism" coming from the Russians that the USA was being judgemental about freedom while also being an apartheid state.
Other people have aped the black civil rights struggle (deemed the "civil rights" struggle), and it has amounted to middle class people walking in the streets, congratulating each other and socializing. I don't know of any accomplishments resulting from that.
Street protests were traditionally a show of force; an indication that an overwhelming number of people were on the edge of violence. They often ended in a lynching, or the burning down of a building. Black people did not have that option, so they just offered their bodies to television cameras - this was not traditional, this was new. The only model they had before that was Gandhi, and that was not a traditional Indian thing as many think, but an idea he took from Tolstoy.
Time to crack open a history book and find out why Baltimore was called Mobtown.
Walking in the street has never done anything.