Solar panel harassment PAYBACK

You did not thoroughly read what Kat wrote.
"... not all of them identify themselves on the caller ID."
Doctors' offices usually have multiple lines. Some of those offices might not have set up the Caller ID information on some of those lines.

Agreed. I work for a company that works for doctor's offices and we frequently get calls from offices that don't have their info on the CID.  Heck, some occasionally show as Anonymous but upon answering, we find out it's a client.

"simple fact" ... it's neither.

If you had framed that as a suggestion instead of an admonishment, it would have made your blame-the-victim philosophy a bit easier to stomach. Although even if in the form of a helpful suggestion, it would have still suffered from the tedium induced by it's endless repetition on these forums.

Let me offer you (and some others) a "simple fact"; your sanctimonious lecture is not well received by those of us who have good reasons why we sometimes need to answer calls from unknown numbers, and we are not required to furnish those reasons to you. I suggest you find some other victims to blame.

I just called the number back and it was a woman's work number, not the compan number. Definitely a scam and phishy....

Yep! Any time a caller is spoofing a phone number like that it's a scam. No legitimate company would have a reason to spoof a phone number.

Plenty of legitimate callers don't identify themselves on CID and some of them don't leave a message. So if a person is waiting for a call from a doctor's office who calls from a back line that doesn't show on the CID and then neglects to leave a message as some are wont to do, that person has missed a necessary call. The whole point, though, was not everyone can NOT answer every incoming call.

Why should HE have to get a new number when it is THEY who are violating the law?

I agree with you completely.  Getting a new number can make things worse not better.  We can always switch to a new number but that will not end junk calls.  It seems the scammers are always one step ahead.

I'm sort of late on this thread, but how exactly do you know they are scammers?Forgive me if I missed something. Often, people fill out things online with their information and DON'T read the privacy policy, where it clearly states that you are agreeing to be contacted by affiliates, partners, etc. If this isn't the case then I understand, but if you are filling out things online with your phone number without doing any reading, what's happening is completely legal and quite frankly, your own fault.

Way to blame the victims, there, sparky.  I get calls every week that others report are solar energy scammers.  I have NEVER filled out any forms like you describe.  Perhaps it is you that needs to do some reading and educate yourself on how DNC-violating crooks like these fire up their autodialers and call any and everyone.

Unless obtained through trickery, prior written consent is a sure way to evade TCPA liability. I agree with the need to be stingy with our personal data. I don't agree with your blanket assumption that it's the only possible privacy leak to the solar panel goons.

I speculate that the callers already know something demographically about their targets before canvassing the county. They may have an idea of the age and income of call recipients, data which need not be obtained directly. In my experience, the waves of South Asian solar callers worked entirely cold otherwise. Nobody here entered contests or filled in stupid online surveys. The same call center hammered us for weeks, running me through the same set of qualifier questions each time. Its reps gave me conflicting and false business names and refused to provide me a consistent business location, claiming vaguely that the company is found "all over". There is a reason for the fog they pump, which you would realize if you'd follow the same homework I did.

Entire call centers are in the business of rounding up leads to sell to solar installers. They advertise openly about how many prospects they can line up at so much a head, and insist (falsely) that they operate legally. I'm pretty sure the headset wage slaves don't precisely know ahead of time which company will actually perform the installation. I don't think they care, so long as they have "qualified" someone to convert to a sale.

I had to agree to an appointment to make that happen. My "lead" was matched up with a buyer, an installer more or less in my region. It was days before I obtained the installer's name, and only then because I had insisted repeatedly on getting a warning phone call before the guy showed up. Otherwise, as predicted, the sales rep would simply have arrived as scheduled by the lead generator and that would be the first chance I had to gather intel. The seller and I had a long phone chat in which I expressed some of my concerns about the secrecy and repeated cold calls, at which the rep registered surprise. It's unclear right now how much the installer shares vicarious liability.

This game reverses the order of how an honest business attracts customers. We've seen much the same backwards model from the back and knee brace idiots, who first make the sale and then find a way to cram the claim down the insurer. I've also had a recent tangle with a cold-calling alarm system seller who first qualified me at length and then kept me on hold for several minutes while he clacked a keyboard, only to announce that no "technicians" were working in my area. In other words, I suspect, he did not represent any single installer and couldn't match the lead to a buyer right away.

Let me underline here that no one in my household has ever expressed a desire for any of the stupid products and services which various creepos want to foist upon us every week, nor are we so careless as to distribute personal data like lawn sprinklers. If you take some more time to read complaint threads, like you should have before shooting off your virtual mouth, you will see that I am hardly alone in having a zero percent reasonable expectation of sales calls for things we never wanted.