Stop Pre-Recorded Calls During Dinner!
RESPONSE BY WWW.BARDENINSURANCE.COM
It will be interesting to see how the Feds will respond to the "black-hat" techniques of small business owners nationwide. It's appears to be totally out of control. I think statistically, telemarketing efforts have sky rocketed w/ affordable, easy accessibility to companies like Odesk, and streamlined global services. The truth of the matter is that when small businesses prospect in this illegal manner, it's a negative reflection on their business is perceived by the very same people they’re soliciting. Although is really hard work, legal lead generation is always the best practice. www.bardeninsurance.com
Big spike in complaints about telemarketing calls, especially
pre-recorded robocalls
By Associated Press, Updated: Sunday,
September 16, 8:28 AM
WASHINGTON — 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.
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