Telemarketers Plan Counterattack 587
Chris Hoofnagle writes "CNN reports that companies who heavily use telemarketing are planning to counterattack consumers with a barrage of spam and junk mail in October, when the new do-not-call registry goes into effect. Slashdotters should be aware that, as well as anti-spam email software, there are tools to avoid junk snail-mail, such as Junkbusters' free Declare, Private Citizen's excellent service and the Postal Service's Prohibitory Order service, which is described at the EPIC privacy page."
EPIC slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
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Stopping Junk Mail with Post Office Prohibitory Orders
Individuals may obtain a prohibitory order to stop junk mail from being sent to a residence. This order can be obtained through a law that prohibits the mailing of advertising materials "which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative." Practically, this means that individuals can obtain a prohibitory order against any junk mail sender.
Individuals wishing to obtain a prohibitory order should visit their local post office for "Form 1500" or click on the link provided below.
The Attorney General's office no longer sues under this statute to obtain damages. However, individuals should still obtain prohibitory orders against junk mailers. By doing so, marketers who engage in saturation mailings (heavily-discounted mailings delivered to every residence in the area that are usually addressed with "Postal Customer" or "Resident") must adjust their address lists so that the materials are no longer sent to the address with the prohibitory order. This results in higher costs to junk mailers.
* Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order (Form 1500), United States Postal Inspection Service [usps.com].
* 39 U.S.C. Sect. 3008, Prohibition of pandering advertisements.
* Rowan v. U.S. Post Office, 397 U.S. 728 (1970). "In today's complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail...Today's merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive."
* Unsolicited Sexually Oriented Advertising, United States Postal Inspection Service.
* Stop Unsolicited Sexually Oriented Advertising in Your Mail, United State Postal Inspection Service.
* Postal Bulletin PB 21977, United State Postal Inspection Service, July 30, 1998. "The prohibitory order. This order aids in protecting customers from receiving pandering advertisements through the mail. An addressee may obtain a prohibitory order against the mailer of an advertisement that the addressee determines, in his or her sole discretion, to be offering matter for sale that is erotically arousing or sexually provocative, as defined in title 39, United States Code, 3008. Postmasters may not refuse to accept a Form 1500 because the advertisement in question does not appear to be sexually oriented. Only the addressee may make that determination. The order prohibits the mailer from sending any further mail to the applicant (and his or her eligible minor children included in the application), effective on the 30th calendar day after the mailer receives the order."
* U.S. Laws on Direct Mail, Junkbusters.
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That's not what the story says... (Score:5, Informative)
That's not what the story says. Sheesh, don't the submitters even read the articles? This story isn't about counterattacking anyone.
Here's a quote that summarizes the story: ''"We plan to shift into other communication mediums, and rely more heavily on traditional TV advertising and e-mail marketing," Allstate acting Chief Marketing Officer Todd DeYoung told the paper.''
In other words, they will stop using telemarketing and shift over to snail mail and email. Will that email be spam? Maybe, maybe not, but a spam from Allstate is a heck of a lot better than a phone call from Allstate every time I sit down to a meal.
Hit them where it hurts - in their customers (Score:3, Informative)
We all hate this shit, but going off at the Telemarketers and Spammers doesn't work - they've proven time and again that they have no respect for the "consumer".
Better is a) Don't buy the stuff, and b) Lodge formal complaints with the CEO of the company's using their services. Most of the top-dogs have little idea their marketing departments are doing this shit so let them know, and let them know you don't like it and won't buy their stuff as long as they do it.
Re:Bah! It won't make a difference. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RReaahh (Score:5, Informative)
It's that nasty sounding tri-tone that you get when you call a phone number that's been disconnected.
Go to wally world and buy a $10 answering machine and a $10 caller ID.
Hit -record- on the answering machine.
Play the SIT tone into the microphone at a LOUD level, TWO TIMES in a row.
Then wait two seconds and say,
"I'm sorry, the number you called is not taking calls right now, please call back later." and repeat the SIT tone two more times loudly.
Set the answering machine to announce only, answer on 4th ring and don't let it record messages.
When the phone rings, look at the caller ID.
If it's not someone you KNOW or it says, "out of area" or "name unavailable" let the machine take care of it for you.
They have a computer that dials and listens for human voices. That's why you get silence when you answer it. When it hears you say "hello" it knows there is a living human there and it switches you to a semi-human operator so they can harrass you for 10 minutes.
The dialing computer hears the SIT tone and it asusmes that it has dialed a phone number that has been disconnected. You number is removed from the dialing databank and won't be tried again until the next billing cycle, they assume that you may have had your phone turned off for nonpayment and maybe get it back on later.
I swear to you this works. Just do it for ONE WEEK and this shit will almost totally stop.
And they DO sell/trade/share/rent those number banks with other companies. So after a few months the calls will all but totally vanish.
TRUST ME, IT WORKS!!
National DNC overhyped (Score:5, Informative)
(offtopic) Additionally, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this is the best idea that the government ever had for creating a database of names and numbers and email addresses. Peole are entering their data for the FTC as fast as they possibly can. And with nothing to show for it in the end.(/offtopic)
The San Jose Mercury News... (Score:3, Informative)
I had to call them about 5 times, and send a FED-EX to the president of Knight-Ridder in order to get it to stop.
Can you imagine? To stop a newspaper I never wanted in the first place, I had to spend about an hour on the phone and $12 on FED-EX bills!
The local Police and City Hall (Palo Alto, CA), tell me there's nothing they can do about it. (I guess they're too busy hugging homeless people.)
The paper weighs about 6 oz, on average. For 6 months thats about 90 pounds of paper. WHat I don't understand is if I decided to deliver, say, 90 pounds of manure "free" to the Palo Alto Police chief, he'd have me arrested. WHY CAN THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS get away with this?
Re:NO KIDDING!!!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RReaahh (Score:4, Informative)
A note about one nasty little loophole in this, though: if you ask them to "remove my number from the database" then they have to remove it, but there's no time limit on how soon they can put it in (they could take it out and put it right back in). If you ask to be put on the "do-not-call list," however, then they are in for a world of hurt. Just get the telemarketing company name and ideally the telemarketer's name as well, and send an email to the FTC. They then are fined $11,000 (reduce your tax burden, eh?).
Re:Here's what you do. (Score:2, Informative)
National Do Not Spam List (Score:1, Informative)
Re:National DNC overhyped (Score:1, Informative)
Bull-total-shit, sherlock.
I'm on the Florida DNC list. When you sign up for the list, you don't get added until the next quarterly update. You can literally sense the date change by the TOTAL dropoff in calls. The telemarketing calls come to a screeching fucking halt on the day you are officially added to the list. It's remarkable.
And, conversely, due to lost mail, I fell off the list (I failed to renew the annual fee). How did I know I fell off the list? The calls started immediately and in earnest. Oh my God, they resumed with a fucking vengence. Sure, for the first 1 or 2 callers, I gave them the "you can't call me, I'm on the list" speech, and they said "no you're not." And then it dawned on me, I wasn't. And the calls just POURED in. Until my resub fee got me back on the list.
The statewide lists (at least in Florida) WORK. And they work unbelievably well. Without threats, paperwork, or enforcement required on the consumer side. Businessness know that if they violate the FL telemarketing law, THEY LOSE THEIR LICENSE TO DO BUSINESS IN FLORIDA. PERIOD. The fines are inconsequential.
Re:RReaahh (Score:5, Informative)
They telemarketers got wise to this and they now only recognize the tri-tone as being legit.
The single tone the telezapper puts out is no longer useable.
A REAL SIT tone still gets the job done..
Re:RReaahh (Score:4, Informative)
You only need to play it once. Loud is good though. Call it from a friend's house to see how it sounds.
Then wait two seconds and say,
"I'm sorry, the number you called is not taking calls right now, please call back later." and repeat the SIT tone two more times loudly.
Set the answering machine to announce only, answer on 4th ring and don't let it record messages.
Completely unnecessary. When the SIT tone is done, record a normal greeting. Set the machine to go ahead and record messages. More SIT tones at the end of your message are annoying and will not help you. Remember that there will be people calling that you actually want to talk to, and you don't want to scare them away.
A telemarketer's computer will detect the SIT tone (the first time) and remove the number from their list, as you said. Or, a live telemarketer will hear the SIT tone and immediately hang up, thinking the number is disconnected - the faster they hang up, the faster they can move on to the next call, and they get paid commission. Your friends/family/etc. will probably stop to listen to your message, which sounds like a normal answering machine, and they'll just leave a message.
When you ARE home, answer the phone normally; don't use the answering machine. If a telemarketer calls, simply tell them: "Please add this number to your Do Not Call list." Notice the difference between "add this number" and "remove this number". The SIT tone on the answering machine when you're not home will have the same effect as asking for your number to be removed - it's better than nothing, but you'll always wind up on some other list. Do Not Call lists are taken VERY seriously.
They have a computer that dials and listens for human voices. That's why you get silence when you answer it. When it hears you say "hello" it knows there is a living human there and it switches you to a semi-human operator so they can harrass you for 10 minutes.
Wrong. The reason you get silence is, their predictive dialing system got a little too aggressive.
Basically what happens is, say you've got 500 employees logged in, all on the phone. A phone call takes X seconds on average. It takes an average of Y seconds to dial a phone number, wait for it to connect, and a hapless victim to answer. Based on these statistics, there should be an employee finished with his/her current call and ready to take a new one in Z seconds (Z is X minus how long ago they started their current call). Wait until Z=Y, and start dialing, even though all employees are still on other calls and nobody's available to talk to a victim. As soon as an employee becomes available, connect them to the number you just dialed. The problem is, since Z can fluctuate by quite a bit, you may have dialed too soon, so when Y seconds go by and the victim answers, no employees have finished with the calls they're already on yet, and the victim gets silence until someone becomes available to connect the call to.
Re:Why so much advertising??? (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. Here in Japan, the government's been trying for ages to get companies to raise their age of retirement to 65 from 60.
Re:STOP BUYING. (Score:1, Informative)
Holy crap! I, like, totally gotta try that.
Seriously, I make it a policy to make life as miserable as possible for cold-calling sales people, so they will grow to hate their jobs and quit, making it harder for these companies to staff their phones.
Also, what you say about not being allowed to hang up is not generally true. Most sales-oriented callers are told to adhere to a strict two-minute per call limit. I just love hearing the nervous twitch of their voices as they realize we are nearing the time limit, I'm clearly not going to buy anything, and they desperately want to find a polite way to end the discussion. Stay on too long for non-sales calls and they will be fired, be rude to me and they will be fired. Once you get these poor saps "off-script" the fun simply never ends!
Re:Another way to SHUT THEM DOWN. (Score:3, Informative)
It depends what country you live in, but on some phone systems, the call doesn't get cleared down until the _caller_ puts the phone on the hook (or the callee puts their phone on the hook for a certain period of time and the exchange times out). If your phone system works like this, they probably just didn't put their end on the hook.
The Wall Street Journal article (Score:1, Informative)
A sure way to stop calls (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RReaahh (Score:3, Informative)
While I am in favor of technological solutions to many problems, telemarketers and consumers will end up in a never-ending war if the only solution is tricking the other side into picking up or not calling. On the other hand, a legal solution is workable here: the telemarketing companies have to have offices, employees and a financial department, and thus can be punished legally and financially. When you get an $11,000 fine for every violation, it takes only a few angry people to hammer your business into bankruptcy. While scammers and other fly-by-night operations don't have these roots, big buisiness probably won't be very willing to deal with shady characters; they would probably end up burned by scammers themselves. Besides, they could be held responsible if they knew they were hiring a company to call people on the do-not-call list. The potential reward is way out of porportion to the risk.
Re:Another way to SHUT THEM DOWN. (Score:3, Informative)
Derek
Re:National DNC overhyped (Score:2, Informative)
They won't have a choice.
A) Caller ID info is required for all such calls as of Oct 1.
B) Spoofing such information can cause the FCC to fine the company more heavily than $11K, and possibly void the company's authority to operate telecommunications equipment.
C) The phone company can find out if A or B were violated through call logs. They might not be happy or excited to do it, but they dont' really have a choice.
Direct Marketers are ALREADY required to provide company name and phone number on request. Simply hanging up on the callee when he requests the info doesn't let them get away with it, unless the callee is not motivated enough to follow up with the phone company and the FTC.
Re:RReaahh (Score:4, Informative)
Uh huh.
It works?
Most telemarketers and outgoing call centers use what is known as a Progressive Dialer. Generally speaking, a Progressive Dialer uses ISDN. ISDN has this wonderful ability to have a "Data" channel, basically taking all of the information that would be considered "In band" (e.g., ringing, busy signal, SIT tones, etc) and placing it inside that data channel--so in theory, the ISDN 'channel' only hears voices...no dial tone, no busy signals, no SIT noise.
That ISDN line knows if your phone really is SIT'ed out, if it really is busy, or what the status of your line is, just by reading the information that your phone company's switch sends it.
I should also remind you that it's probably against your phone company's TOS to use SIT tones on your answering machine, however, YMMV.
This is just technical information, and I'm going from my limited experince as a Telephone Switch Operator for a campus that had a little under 3000 trunk lines. It may work for you, but, who knows...it may not.
Another loophole (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, since I've signed up for the no-call list two years ago I haven't had a spam call since (only charity calls). The list works, but it takes several months from the time you sign up to the time you are legally allowed to start taking names because the directory of uncallable phone numbers is only published once every three months. Also, I think there is a 3 or 4 year time-limit on the list before you have to sign up for it again.
Re:NO KIDDING!!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Privacy Director/Manager (Score:2, Informative)
Start with caller ID with name and number. Privacy Director (that's what they call it in my area), takes over when the number is unidentified. It answers the call before your phone even rings, and asks the caller to identify themselves. If they refuse, your phone doesn't even ring.
If they do, p.d. calls you ("privacy director" comes up on your caller ID), and you listen to the recorded identification (sort of like accepting toll calls). Then you can decide, at the press of a button, to accept or reject the call. When you reject the call, p.d. tells the caller something like "this number does not accept those kinds of calls", or somesuch.
The problem is that I was paying over $15/month extra to have caller ID and privacy director, but I've found a new local company (look online for one, they're springing up all over) that includes three features in the basic plan - guess two of the ones I chose.
So now I'm not getting ripped off by the phone company, either - they make out like bandits, charge the telemarketers for phone numbers, and hook them up with all their lines, then charge the residential customers to not have to recieve those calls.
As an annecdotal side note to the guy whose first call was a telemarketer; I signed up for internet service with BellSouth (who I just fired as my local phone company), and while I was making a transition from one provider to BellSouth, before I gave my email to anybody, I was getting spam. I called BellSouth and cancelled before I ever even used the service (I used the web service to check the account had been activated, so I actually got spams before I even knew the account was active!).
They denied giving my email address to anybody.
Re:They are asking for trouble..... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the way I understand it, it works something like this:
- Company A is trying to sell a widget, and hires Company B (a marketing company) to help them sell more widgets
- Company B basically coordinates things, but does nothing itself. They outsource to several different companies specializing in various forms of advertising - one for print ads in magazines and newspapers, possibly another to make/run a commerical on the radio or TV, and, of course, Company C, who does telemarketing. (Possibly also having Companies D, E and F do it as well...)
- Company C's real business is not telemarketing, but selling customer lists, containing phone, email, street addresses, etc... They outsource the actual calling job (along with a calling list) to Company G.
- Company G has an automated calling device, instead of an actual phone center. They make the call, play a pre-recorded pitch, and refer you to call Company H for more details. Since there's no actual PERSON to talk to, you can't ask to be put on their "Do Not Call" list.
- Company H (who does no calling, only taking calls, and orders, passing them back to Company C, who then passes it back on to Company A) answers your (rather irate) phone call, asking to be put on their "Do Not Call" list. Since they do no calling, they don't have a "Do Not Call" list at all, and can't help. When you ask who they work for, so that you may be put on their "Do Not Call" list, they may or may not give you an answer, depending on whether they are allowed to give out such "confidential company information".
- Even if you manage to track it back to Company C, and speak to someone there, since they only outsource to calling companies, and do no calling themselves, their "Do Not Call" list is also useless to you, as it would only be binding for them, not the company doing the actual calling. Again, depending on their policy, you may or may not be able to actually get information on the calling company itself. Most likely not, as it would sabotage their business model if they were to give out that information.
- Even if you do manage to get added to one calling company's "Do Not Call" list, other calling companies aren't bound by that (and the one you did get on may "expire" after 3 months or so)
Yes, I speak from personal experience, after attempting to track down and get onto the "Do Not Call" list for whatever companies Disney hires to telemarket their cruises. Whomever they use (I wasn't able to get a company name, because it's "confidential") uses an automated dialer, with a 15 minute sales pitch recording that doesn't care if it's talking to an answering machine or not. My answering machine only holds 15 minutes worth of messages - so one of their pitches makes my machine useless.The problem is that there's so many layers, each independant of the others, and each wary of giving out "company secrets" regarding their "business partners", that it's like pulling teeth to get any kind of information out of them. And heaven forbid you actually tell them you're trying to stop the telemarketing calls -- that's grounds for them to immediately hang up on you in most cases.