All spammers must die.

[theweaselking]

Gee, apparently providing your valid telephone number to spammers so they know to not spam you doesn't really work.

I mean, it's not like we knew that before from email, or anything.

Comments

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

I figure I'm about two weeks from another series of calls where I supposedly signed up to pestered about online college courses.

I told the last one "Ma'am, I already have two college degrees. I do not need more."

[chaosrah.livejournal.com]

lol, lovely.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I can't fault the Do Not Call list for that one; I can fault the phone spammers for being dumb enough to pay $50 for a list that the could've had for free by stealing a phone book or grepping online white-pages.

-- Steve knows that there's great difficulty in making rules to handle people who break rules.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No, because Do Not Call lists are attractive to a certain kind of person: The kind who answers their phone all the time.

And so, by targeting them, you get more pickups. And since the phonespam companies get paid by their idiot customers based on pickups...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

PS: handling this is REALLY easy.

Make telemarketing illegal.

Make an outbound sales "cold-call"? Pay a fine, to the person you called, or go to jail. On principle, in fact, regulate *all* call-centers to severely limit outbound calling capability, with inspections, penalty shutdowns, and massive fines for noncompliance. Like a liquor license.

Employ a telemarketer? Pay a fine, to the victims of the telemarketer, or go to jail.

Essentially, this leaves overseas call centers *employed by overseas companies* as the sole source of phonespam - and it's actually fairly rare that they'll want it, AND international calls from phonespammers are filterable by the phone company.

THAT'S how you handle the problem.

(While I'm at is, make the deliberate sending of unsolicited bulk email carry a penalty of one punch in the head per message. Your average spammer costs several man-lifetimes of work every year in economic losses - why not treat his crimes appropriately? And I also want a pony)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

"Make telemarketing illegal."

You're so cute sometimes.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

And also give me a pony!

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I worked on outbound and inbound sales programs, and in every one our company got paid on the basis of man-hours plus expenses. We were contracted to produce a minimum specific ratio, usually 2:1, in revenue. Pickups didn't help us; conversions did... so in our case dialing from the DNC would've been suicide even without the criminal fees.

It literally never occurred to me that anyone would pay per pickup. Any client dumb enough that way should probably be institutionalised as a danger to himself and others.

-- Steve knows a few ways to seriously grief that form of contract; for instance, phone switches show external answering machines accepting the call as pick-ups too.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

But seriously. How is phone-spam any different from email-spam or fax-spam? Fax-spam is illegal. Phonespamming a cellular device is illegal. There's a universal consensus from every remotely tech-savvy non-spammer that email-spam *should* be illegal, and in a lot of places it is. Why the hell is phonespam considered so magically special that it should be treated any differently?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The Indian call center that runs the "lower your interest rate" credit card scam that some of the commenters in the article are complaining about gets paid every time one of the people they call presses 1 to talk to a live person.

Which is why the agents will sign you up if they can, and as soon as they think you're not going to sign up, they tell you to fuck off and hang up on you.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Fax spam, cell spam, email spam all have in common that it's the recipient paying for the message. Phone spam has the originator paying. That, at least from my recollection, was the critical difference... like door-to-door, it's not incurring a monetary cost on the end of the contact who isn't expecting it.

-- Steve now has this absurd mental image of a home phone spammer trying to do so by calling collect...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also: "outbound sales programs"? Calling whom, exactly?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Show me a free home phone line, and I'll show you someone who isn't paying[1] to receive phonespam.

By your argument, it should be totally okay to call cellphones as long as they're on an "unlimited" plan or the like.

[1]: But it still costs them. My time is more valuable than the spammers' (by definition) and they're costing me my valuable time. They're also making my phone line unavailable for my personal use during their calls.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

It varied depending upon the client; some cold-calls to businesses, some callbacks to previous or current customers for followup sales, did the long distance thing for a while but I sucked at it and got shunted off to something more tech-y. (The long distance guys are not clients anymore, by the way. Other than the B2B contract, which was sweet, inbound sales and order fulfillment ended up being far more lucretive and were more stable to boot.)

-- Steve doesn't miss that end of the business.

[wyatt1048.livejournal.com]

Strange, the UK version of that seems to work. I can't remember ever having a sales call at home.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

You pay rent/property tax. My knocking on your door does not increase that. Neither does making your phone ring... there's no incremental cost to the recipient in that case.

-- Steve knows that the time it takes to say "please place me on your do not call list" is not an undue burden.

PS: the reason cell calls were outright banned was because there was no way to tell the difference between "unlimited" and "minutes" plans based on what the phone switch would report.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

there's no incremental cost to the recipient in that case.

There's no incremental cost to the recipient for receiving an email, either - but, like email spam, phonespam causes your *provider* expenses to deal with it.

Steve knows that the time it takes to say "please place me on your do not call list" is not an undue burden.

Yeah, man, and the time it takes you to click an unsubscribe link on an email is totally trivial, too! And spammers, both email and phone, TOTALLY respect that and don't just add you to their growing list of people who open/answer read/listen and click/"press 1 now" on spam so they can send you more of it, because you read the first bunch!

If the telemarketing assholes actually *stopped calling* when you asked them to stop calling you, *and* if it wasn't a completely undue burden to require *me* to tell every telemarketing front company individually that each one should stop calling me, then you *might* have a point.

But telemarketers *DON'T* respect remove requests, because telemarketers are not honest. And we know that it is completely unreasonable to require me to tell every single individual telemarketer to stop calling me, and then tell the telemarketers *again* to stop calling me every time they change their name or get a new contract.

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

I gotta say, my instances of telemarketing calls have gone way down since I put myself on this list. I commonly refer to it as "the only thing Bush did right."

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with lists like this is that the only people who are going to listen to it are the relatively few honest marketers - while it's a one-stop-shopping setup for the DIShonest ones who massively outnumber them.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

PS: If you get fewer calls, awesome. We do *not*. We just get more calls, from the people who have no interest in respecting remove requests.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

You're overgeneralising.

If you signed up for the DNC you're no longer receiving calls from those who respect the DNC master list, as my firm does. You would still get them from the scam artists, who don't respect laws because, duh, scammers... but it's unreasonable to blame the DNC for that.

If you didn't sign up for the DNC, then, duh, of course you'll still get calls from all sides. Complaining about that makes as much sense as purple absinthe crows roaring sober fishnets.

-- Steve's not precisely congruent with e=~2.71828 time-space at the moment *cough-hack* and apologises for any unclarity in the cross-brane translation.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm not complaining about the Do Not Call list.

I'm complaining that the telemarketers expect me to "opt out" individually from every one, and that they insist it's their right to cost me time and money until then - and, of course, since, just like email, *occasionally* a rare one will respect an opt-out request and *most* of the time they'll just mark me down as someone who reads their spam, the only correct solution to spamming, be it phone or email, is to kill the spammer. For email, that means taking down the spam payload site and killing the source of the spew. For phones, there unfortunately isn't a good way to do it.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

See, I boggle at the industry opposing these lists (which they did) and scammers using them

By definition, people on that list are not only not interested - but they're going to be HELLA pissed if you DO call.

This? Is not helpful when you want them to give the monies

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Legitimate firms respect the DNC.

Illegitimate firms don't respect a damn thing.

-- Steve's mainly objecting to the overbroad accusation that all telemarketers are out to shit in your soup. It's one of those "they all look alike to me" things. Some are bastards, most are not. Alas, it's the bastards that are the memorable ones.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Are you reporting them for the DNC fine, or is the Canadian version different?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Telemarketing, like bulk commercial email, falls into two categories.

#1: That which I have specifically opted-in to receive, before the first contact from the telemarketing company.
#2: Shit in my soup.

Your company promises to only shit in my soup once, as long as I examine your shit closely first, choose to talk to someone who has just shit in my soup, and then request, clearly and more than once in a set amount of time, that you please do not do so again. Gee, thanks.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: Canadian version is different.
#2: These are SCAMMERS. First, they are not interested in giving you any indication of who they are. Second, the main offenders are an AMERICAN "company", based in Texas, and the call centre is in INDIA. They're going after Canadians because *all they want is your credit card information*, and that's universal. Good luck getting them to pay up, even if there *was* a real penalty to ignoring the list.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

No, it didn't. As I said, back before we got out of outbound cold calling^* my company respected regional and national DNC lists (long before it was legally required to do so; I was dealing with "cleaning" phone lists for DNC-registered and possible-cell number entries in 2001) and so won't call anyone on it. In addition, anyone in our firm *not* immediately respecting a do-not-call request got put into progressive discipline.

That's one reason I didn't just turn around and leave; the "don't be evil" mission statement isn't exclusive to Google.

-- Steve will point out that not all utilities are Enrons, not all used car salesmen try to rip you off, and not all IT staff are soul-stunted dweebs who will never know the embrace of a woman.

^* Admittedly, this didn't end for warm-and-fuzzy reasons. It simply cost less and paid more to stick with inbound or follow-up programs... less employee turn-over being the big factor there. Fly-by-nights don't worry about turn-over because they don't worry about training; the big leagues do.

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

I don't know what got them to listen, but the calls dropped noticeably after I got us on the list.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

I remember there was a flurry of database work to be had around that time.

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

I have. By and large, it does work, but sales calls do scoot through. I don't always have the time to spare, but when I do, I make a civilised, polite stink about it (and once, when a sales representative actually hung up on me, I phoned back to ask to speak to a manager and complain-- I hope that call was recorded for training purposes).

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

Back in tech-support, I do a fair bit of outbound calling to follow up on service requests. If you pass this legislation, I can Gua-ran-damn-tee you that next time you have a problem with your DSL, *you* will be calling a premium rate number for any and all communications. Because while they're not *sales* calls, *or* cold, the documentation to prove this will cost waaaaay too much, given that we're already foregoing our n cents a minute by calling outbound instead of in.

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

You're wrong, as far as I can tell, in the US and certainly for the equivalent here in NL. The majority are not scammers, and the ones that are still know better than to deliberately call numbers from the DNC registry. That would be pissing in your *own* soup.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The documentation to prove that will cost waaaaay too much, just like the *existing* documentation that the *existing* call centres need to show that the Do Not Call list doesn't apply to them?

what I'm suggesting is nothing more and nothing less than a replacement of the Do Not Call list with
A) something with actual penalties
B) something that *correctly* applies the burden of telemarketing calls only to those who sign up explicitly to receive them.