'Do Not Call' Complaints Up Sharply As More Americans Get Robocalled

WASHINGTON (AP) — So much for silence from telemarketers at the cherished dinner hour, or any other hour of the day.

Complaints to the government are up sharply about unwanted phone solicitations, raising questions about how well the federal "do-not-call" registry is working. The biggest category of complaint: those annoying prerecorded pitches called robocalls that hawk everything from lower credit card interest rates to new windows for your home.

Robert Madison, 43, of Shawnee, Kan., says he gets automated calls almost daily from "Ann, with credit services," offering to lower his interest rates.

"I am completely fed up," Madison said in an interview. "I've repeatedly asked them to take me off their call list." When he challenges their right to call, the solicitors become combative, he said. "There's just nothing that they won't do."

Madison, who works for a software company, says his phone number has been on the do-not-call list for years. Since he hasn't made any progress getting "Ann" to stop calling, Madison has started to file complaints about her to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the list.

Amid fanfare from consumer advocates, the federal do-not-call list was put in place nearly a decade ago as a tool to limit telemarketing sales calls to people who didn't want to be bothered. The registry has more than 209 million phone numbers on it. That's a significant chunk of the country, considering that there are about 84 million residential customers with traditional landline phones and plenty more people with cellphone numbers, which can also be placed on the list.

Telemarketers are supposed to check the list at least every 31 days for numbers they can't call. But some are calling anyway, and complaints about phone pitches are climbing even as the number of telemarketers checking the registry has dropped dramatically.

Government figures show monthly robocall complaints have climbed from about 65,000 in October 2010 to more than 212,000 this April. More general complaints from people asking a telemarketer to stop calling them also rose during that period, from about 71,000 to 182,000.

At the same time, fewer telemarketers are checking the FTC list to see which numbers are off limits. In 2007, more than 65,000 telemarketers checked the list. Last year, only about 34,000 did so.

Despite those numbers, the FTC says the registry is doing an effective job fighting unwanted sales calls.

"It's absolutely working," Lois Greisman, associate director of the agency's marketing practices division, said in an interview with The Associated Press. But, she said, "the proliferation of robocalls creates a challenge for us."

Greisman said prerecorded messages weren't used as a major marketing tool in 2003, when the registry began. "In part because of technology and in part because of greater competitiveness in the marketplace, they have become the marketing vehicle of choice for fraudsters," she said.

For people trying to scam people out of their money, it's an attractive option. Robocalls are hard to trace and cheap to make.

With an autodialer, millions of calls can be blasted out in a matter of hours, bombarding people in a struggling economy with promises of debt assistance and cheap loans. Even if a consumer does not have a phone number on the do-not-call list, robocalls are illegal. A 2009 rule specifically banned this type of phone sales pitch unless a consumer has given written permission to a company to call.

Political robocalls and automated calls from charities, or informational robocalls, such as an airline calling about a flight delay, are exempt from the ban. But those exemptions are being abused, too, with consumers complaining of getting calls that begin as a legitimate call, say from a charity or survey, but then eventually switch to an illegal telemarketing sales pitch.

Robocalls can be highly annoying to consumers because they're hard to stop. Fraudsters use caller-ID spoofing so that when a person tries to call back the robocaller, they get a disconnected number or something other than the source of the original call.

The best thing people can do when they get an illegal robocall is to hang up. Do not press "1'' to speak to a live operator to get off the call list. If you do, the FTC says, it will probably just lead to more robocalls. The caller will know you're there and willing to answer, and may continue to call.

The FTC says people can also contact their phone providers to ask them to block the number. But be sure to ask whether they charge for that. Telemarketers change caller-ID information often, so it might not be worth paying a fee to block a number that will soon change.

The industry says most legitimate telemarketers don't utilize robocalls to generate sales.

"They give a bad name to telemarketers and hurt everybody," says Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs at Direct Marketing Association, a trade group.

Cerasale says the do-not-call list has resulted in telemarketers making far fewer cold calls to random people. Instead, he says, marketers have shifted to other methods of reaching people, such as mail, email or targeted advertisements on websites. That, he said, could be one of the reasons that the number of telemarketers checking the registry has dropped so sharply.

In light of the increased complaints, the FTC is stepping up efforts to combat robocalls. It recently released two consumer videos to explain what robocalls are and what to do about them. It also announced an October summit to examine the problem and explore the possibility of emerging technology that might help trace robocalls and prevent scammers from spoofing their caller ID.

Enforcement is another tool. The FTC has brought cases against about a dozen companies since 2009, including Talbots, DirecTV and Dish Network. The cases have yielded $5.6 million in penalties.

The agency said this month that it was mailing refund checks to more than 4,000 consumers nationwide who were caught up in a scam where the telemarketer used robocalls from names like "Heather from card services" to pitch worthless credit card rate reduction programs for an up-front fee. Checks to consumers range from $31 to $1,300 depending on how much was lost.

To file a complaint with the FTC, people can go online to www.ftc.gov or call 888-382-1222 to report their experience for possible enforcement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/16/do-n ... 2.html#comments

And the weird part is that the callers get paid even if nobody picks up their call. Now this makes me think of one thing, the callers and their owners are either insane or just desperate. They are all behaving like a crazy cult. The slaves don't have the ability to make independent decisions cause of false promises and little payment given to them by their owners. Most probably the crooks have family to feed but then that's not a good reason to turn into a slave missing a backbone. The crooks who set them up are comfortable thinking they won't get caught as long as they have them hidden overseas in places like South East Asia, South Asia, Central America etc. When companies started outsourcing, crooks started outsourcing as well.

I got a call from the following number below.

800-218-2350

Some Auto Insurance Quote, and just like the 4th paragraph down "repeatedly told them to take me off their list" seems to be the common complaint from the number and the associated number to it.

I have an auto reject feature on my phone, and when I block one number, another number calls from what I believe is the same company, calling about insurance quotes. So far three numbers have been blocked.

These vile people have a purpose, to make people angry and upset, to make people cuss. If these creeps were to read postings at 800notes and other similar sites, they no doubt would laugh at our furor over their intrusions into our lives. Of course, they are not going to cast an eye upon 800notes, etc. They have us right where they want us, with our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being crushed under their boot heels.

If cell phones and the internet had not been invented, these termites would have nevertheless found a way to drive telephone owners up a wall. Remember also, that for all the Robo-calls they make, the companies behind the calls are making money. Stop the money somehow, and there should be a good chance to knock the pins out from under the villains and their cohorts.

Other than annoy us on a daily basis with their stupid robocalls, they can't do a damn thing to us or stop us from living our lives freely. They are losers who don't have freedom or a happy life to begin with. That's why they are stuck in their boiler rooms trying to put their misery upon others. They want to put their misery upon us but they will never ever win even if we get frustrated, threatened, or mad. They don't have the courage to harass other criminals. No matter how many robocalls they do or how many numbers they change, they don't control our lives. They better pray that we don't unite and end up in their boiler rooms :-)

Verizon told me that they are not allowed to block telemarketer calls as they have the right to make money. I said, what about my rights?? no satisfaction so I purchased a phone with a built in call blocker. It has to say it on the box, some sales people don`t know if has call block. Check it out., it`s worth it.

Both Verizon FiOS and Verizon Wireless allow you to block incoming calls.

What you need to do:
(1) Do not answer unknown numbers, but if you must -
(2) Hang up on any call you do not wish to talk to. It's YOUR phone
(3) Do NO business over the phone, or at the door.
(4) NEVER give out personal/financial information out over the phone. For ANY reason.
(5) In a random cold call, you will NEVER - win a prize, get a loan, get a Government Grant. Not going to happen.
(6) Do not agonize over every call. You don't have to call them back. Check a call. Forget about it. Move on.

My reply to Verizon would be,   I have have a choice of who provides my phone service and I choose  to not use your company any more.

Ruby's post was from January of this year and at the time of the post, they were correct.
As phone carriers are considered "common carriers" and are classified as utilities in the USA, they are required to pass through whatever they received and deliver it to who it was intended for.

However...

This summer, the FCC and FTC came together and made an exemption to that regulation.
Both have stated that all phone common carriers are not required too and should take steps to stop "robocalls" and other forms of illegal calls and messages from passing through their systems.
See:
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-strengthens- ... calls-and-texts

Referring to an FCC declaratory ruling as an "exemption" is misleading. The common carrier rules never needed revision, only how they should be read for what they do *not* say, which was part of the point of that ruling.

Phone carriers still cannot and should not play unilateral gate guard for their customers. Mobile and landline carriers can, as regulators insist, do a much better job of building call management into their services so that *customers can decide* which callers to distrust.

prior discussion:
https://800notes.com/forum/ta-c7f332226206a68 ... 753183657519067
https://800notes.com/forum/ta-c9bb9eea78c465c ... 050708579166565

While I agree with you on the gate keeper part, I still think that if the phone companies were held held financially responsible after the first scam robo call would give the phone companies an incentive to shut down the offender quickly if they own the number that made such calls. As for spoofed number the phone companies could nip that in the bud real quick, It just depends on their incentive to do so, money talks, BS walks!!!

Never happen, since they would then be liable for losses on both sides. If they blocked the wrong call, they could get sued for that as well. They are a 'Common Carrier' for a reason, and if they start actively doing anything like that, besides creating tool sets for customers, it opens up a huge can of worms that no one really wants to do.

Plus it cuts into your baiting quota

My thoughts were close to that of double-T. Every minute of the day, somebody somewhere is not going to like a phone call, even if it's innocent as a newborn and free as air. The phone system was built with scarce thought put toward authentication of call sources. Combine those two factors to make a toxic lake of frivolous potential litigation the carriers would have to swim in all day, had the Telecomm Act not immunized their industry against problems they did not create.

There's a valid argument for centralized nuisance call management as more efficient and less costly for the head end versus shifting the burden to subscribers, and a rough model in the way email servers are monitored. The technical burden would be substantial, and the overall problem of system abuse might never be defeated, as subscribers tend to believe that personal data security is always Someone Else's Problem.