This summer, the national Do Not Call Registry, managed by the Federal Trade Commission, turned 10 years old, and there are now a whopping 221 million phone numbers in the registry.
But the calls keep coming. Telemarketing complaints at the FTC have risen from 150,393 in 2003 to nearly 4 million last year (roughly 2 million of those were robocall complaints). At the FCC, the number of robocall concerns has doubled in the past two years, reaching 100,000 in 2012.
So who is it to blame? Caroline Mayer from Forbes says it's the technology, and I agree.
It drastically lowered the cost of long-distance calls to less than a penny per minute, created automated dialers that can blast out thousands of solicitations a minute, and also allowed callers to hide their identity via "caller ID spoofing".
To try stemming the illegal telemarketing tide, the FTC recently sponsored a Robocall Challenge, awarding $50,000 to tech ideas the agency thought had the most promise for blocking robocalls. The three winners conceived automated algorithms to identify, intercept and filter out illegal prerecorded calls that would be placed on a blacklist and are trying to sell these computerized programs to U.S. phone companies.
So, let's wait and see if the same technology helps consumers detect and block unwanted calls for good. Until then, make the violations known and public by reporting the illegal calls here at 800notes and to the FTC.
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