FTC: 200 Million Sign Up For Do Not Call Registry

Most of who signed up have no idea what is covered by donotcall rules and what is NOT covered by them. BECAUSE THEY NEVER BOTHER TO READ THE MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE

"more than 60 complaints" - well that certainly had the violators shaking in their boots.  I'm sorry, I meant to say rolling on the floor laughing.  As I have said many times before, the FTC likes the occasional headline, but they have no intention of doing the hard grinding work of actively enforcing DNC.  If you think that anyone paid 5.3 million in fines, you are very naive.  If you follow the enforcement activities closely, you will learn that such fines are settled in the thousands, if they are paid at all.  Big government, big show, big lie, big scam, political pockets lined, self serving bureaucrats, crooks running wild.  Same old story, the FTC dislocates shoulder patting self on back.  We'd all sincerely like to believe they were doing their job, and that our tormentors were getting what they deserved.  Sadly, it just isn't so.

"The FTC has in its possession, however, a collection of over 7.2 million DNC complaints that have been registered by consumers from the date of the inception of the DNC registry." http://dnc.com/complianceInfo/News/Articles/F ... _DNC_Lists.adpx

Seven million complaints and 60 actions against telemarketers.   Is it any wonder telemarketers consider the DNC little more than a minor and easily circumvented --that is to say violated--inconvenience?

The FCC doesn't have enough staff to go after all the telemarketers.  Apparently they target the ones that get the most complaints.  So sign up, then complain.  Report every telemarketing call.  

And NEVER NEVER NEVER buy ANYTHING from someone who calls you.  That one sucess selling one item to one person will cover their expenses to mak 10,000 more attempts.

not Michael,

AFAIK, it is the FTC who runs the DNC list, not the FCC.  As to staffing - if the politicians wanted this to be an effective law they would provide for adequate staff.  The fines could pay the cost of operation if it were being vigorously enforced.

Never underestimate the degree of incompetence, lethargy, and corruption which has taken hold in the Federal government. No matter how cynical you are, no matter how bad you think it is, it is worse than you can imagine.

Doesn't matter if they know or not. The DNC is being used by scammers as a number harvesting tool.

I'm tired of the calls for someone else and they keep  calling anyway.  It doesn't stop.... Do they think that person is going to move into my house when I'm gone.

I think they mean the FTC has taken action against 60 companies. I'm sure the number of consumer complaints is much higher. I'm also sure that 60 companies can place a $#!tload of calls. But sadly, more companies will spring up to replace them.

Actually, the caller thinks you are lying.  

The person they are looking for may be behind in their bills and gave a false phone number the last time they took out a loan. Or they had your number before you got it, and they donated to a charity or looked at new cars or any of the other reasons someone might ask for a phone number.  

Either way, the caller thinks the person they are looking for is available at your number.

Wow, we've had a DNCR law here (Can.) for two years now and it's enforced.  If they call you can report them and they do get called on it with fines.  Now it's considered phone fraud if they screw with you, especially if they've been told not to contact at all.
No more telemarketing calls at all.
Good luck with this guys and hope it does what it's suppose to do...stop the harassing phone calls from strangers to your home endlessl.

Here's a new approach that might work.  I thought you all might benefit by considering the following ideas.  The DNC, while well intentioned, can't solve this problem without huge costs to everyone.  Consider the possibility that there might be a MUCH better was to SOLVE the problem.  What is the problem?  Each violations costs someone a huge amount of time to investigate and prosecute each offense fairly and cost effectively.  No, WE must be given to tools to police our OWN calls.  Here's how:

I posted this, reporting just one number that was violating the rules with only three complaints.  I think this illustrates why litigation and prosecution can't possibly work.

These companies will continue to harass us all until and unless we have better tools to stop them,  The national DoNotCall list won't help.  Why?  Because the cost to any one of us to go after them would far exceed anything we could hove to recover for our efforts.  The only way to stop them is to start lobbying the FTC and congress the pass laws that are EFFECTIVE, rather than laws that just LOOK GOOD.

I'm suggesting the following:  USE sites like this, to CREATE our own blocked list.  (I must say THIS site is now one of my most frequently visited sites on the internet.)  

On this site, create a method of VOTING, where we can decide as a group, to add ANY number to the COMMUNITY BLOCK list.  These numbers would INCLUDE all the the "exempted" DNC organizations that legally have the right to harass you for the rest of your life.**  Then REQUIRE the FTC or the FCC to, UPON SUBSCRIBER REQUEST, BLOCK any of these numbers from even ringing.  To do this, each phone company would only have to quickly search through the blocked numbers before dialing your home phone.  This would give us EFFECTIVE control of who was calling us.  We could even get more specific, and categorize some callers.  Say, you DO want the political calls to come in... (They are sometimes entertaining.)  As a subscriber, you could "opt in" for these types of calls.

(This can be done at a very very low technological cost to any phone exchange today.  First a PC would have to search the number database, updated daily or weekly, to see if the number called is a blocked number.  MY PC could do this task of search and then produce a "yes or no" to any number that was queried from a list of over 20,000,000 blocked stored numbers, at a rate of several million number searches per second.  So, you'd only need ONE PC nationwide!  Then, each exchanges' incoming call could be passed only the numbers that were cleared though this ONE PC nationally, in real real time.  This is only an example of how it could be done is not a real-world implementation.  But this will hopefully show that there isn't a technical or economic reason for any entity not to do this.)

The key to making this work however, would be to establish an administrative rule, or law, that would require all phone exchanges to offer this service to their consumers.  They would have to add any numbers to the "consumer subscription block list verification service", at no charge.  Then, they would have to create a way to query all incoming calls against this list before a call was put through.  

IN THEORY, this should be economically feasible at a very low cost, but would have to be researched to verify my theory. But, without such a system, I see nothing that can be applied by government law alone, without creating a governing body that is comprised by consumers that have chosen to include themselves in the community of chosen screened calls, where the list was created strictly by volunteers.  This would make it virtually impossible for ANY company to robo call from a given set of numbers, at least to subscribers.  For those companies that offer blocks of 800 numbers to robo callers to call from, these numbers would become worth less and less if they were constantly being used by robo calling.  So, the companies offering 800 services would be renting out the lines and numbers at increasingly higher rates for those numbers that were not {yet) blocked.  ie, economics would quickly ensure that robo-callers would not be able to afford the lines that had not been yet blocked. Even if they did use these lines, it would only take a day or so for the new numbers to be blocked, which would then become nearly worthless to the owners of the numbers, who only rented those numbers to the robo-caller.  (Numbers are not an unlimited commodity to phone companies, and they do cost them $$)

** If you inherited a number from someone who was a deadbeat, have a relative or neighbor who is a deadbeat, or the caller thinks you a deadbeat or KNOW one, you WILL be harassed legally, as long as the calling companies think it is economically worth it.  Yes, you can make them stop--legally, but not effectively and economically.  Every time a new company calls you, you who are truly are the wrong people, you can complain in writing, in person, or by speaking with a human that has a clue and you are willing to endure the time, trouble and often rude harassment of the caller, they MIGHT take you off their list... unless they either don't believe you aren't, "just not cooperating with them"  or the message to drop you from their list is lost before it is dropped.  Even in the best of cases, this won't work for more than a week, since debts are bought and sold weekly to a new group or robo-callers.  The new buyer is free to continue to call you, even thought the last company you talked to and did drop you from their list and couldn't legally call you.  You see, when they sold the debt, YOUR number stayed on the file, and the next company CAN legally start calling you, so you will NEVER be legally able to stop the new debt buyer from calling you.  (Because presumably, since 'by law' you have the right to "tell them to stop", this is an effective way to protect yourself.  Of course, this remedy is never cost effective for you, so no one uses it.)  And so, for the next ten years, you will be harassed with no ability to stop it economically.  I know, because I've inherited just such a number.  I also have my own dismissed case from 1973 that I am still getting harassed from.  

Don't allow congress, or any agency create any rule or law that can't be applied universally.  Laws can't cope with complex issues that change often, can be subverted, and only look like they solve the problems.   Remote bureaucrats will protect and persist any existing rules, regardless if they are effective.  They have little incentive to solve the problem, and a huge incentive to protect themselves and their existing rules, which of course, makes it impossible it create a system that will work to replace it.  Health care, our banking, cars, are all great examples of trying to apply simple permanent laws, or rules governed by bureaucrats that presumably work to effect the purpose of these laws, to solve the underlying issues.  Of course, laws can't work because no one is able to foresee all the contingencies of health care, for instance, any more than this small DNC list problem.  Bureaucrats could probably accomplish this, but agencies that are comprised of and run by bureaucrats can never be built so that the incentive is to effectively solve problems.  It would really make no economic sense to "solve the DNC list problem" if YOU, with good intentions, worked there.  If you did, you'd be out of at least be out that DNC job.  No, the ONLY economic things you should do in setting policy that would make sense FOR YOU, is to perpetuate any procedure or rule that furthers or advances YOUR career.  And, anything that increases the size of your agency will always benefit those who are already there, since they promote from within.  

Enough of my rant -- Just try to support CHANGING THE GAME!!  GIVE INCENTIVES BACK TO THOSE THAT CAN AND WILL SOLVE PROBLEMS !!

I used to work for a telemarketing company who sold products and services nationwide.  It cost them over $15,000.00 a year just to be registered with the DNC list and to call numbers in all area codes within the nation of consumers who were not on the DNC list.  I think the entire DNC list was created as yet another revenue channel for our crooked politicians to have more money to waste on their special interests, private planes, etc, etc.  It's no wonder companies are outsourcing jobs (inluding mine - notice that "I used to work for a telemarketing company") to other countries because everywhere you turn big government is making it next to impossible to afford to conduct business in this country!  Think about how many home telephone numbers and cell phone numbers there are in United States - then look at your bill closely to see what you pay in FCC charges.  Imagine how much revenue comes into the government JUST from all of us US Citizens on a MONTHLY basis!  We are a country who is being taxed to death!  I hope we all wake up one day and vote all these old farts out of office and appoint a younger generation of citizens who are going to serve the people of this country properly and not for the special interests!

BigE,

I completely understood what they meant.  But I have also visited the "enforcement actions" section of the FTC web site enough to know what a joke most of these "actions" are.  Start reading it when you are bored, and after a while I suspect you will come to see my point of view.

i signed up and they still keep calling me

haven't had my new number one full day before I got a call from this number and they have been calling multiple times daily ever since.   I have no debt and no idea why they are calling me.   why doesn't the phone company have a "block this number" feature?  end of story.