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."
RReaahh (Score:2, Insightful)
The paper said that in addition to seeing more e-mail or junk mail, consumers who call companies on other business may now have to listen to sales pitches while negotiating voice mail messages.
Yeah, that's what I wanna hear- I'm a dog, and I get to listen to kibbles and bits and bits and bits next time I call to get my dog neutered. Tell ya what boys, you pull a voice spam on me while I try to give you business and I'll just be letting my dog hose down whatever he feels like instead. As I close my CNN Money Pop up. I fell for something pretty bad tonight too- got my first land line in three years (cell only since) and it rang for the first time tonight. I hadnt given the number to anyone. I picked it up... listened for about 10 seconds of silence. I go, "hello?" CLICK. Looks like another fake hotmail address for the Do Not Call registry. Crimony. Doesn't it just make you livid? Gah.
Bah! It won't make a difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good thing about email (Score:4, Insightful)
STOP BUYING. (Score:4, Insightful)
What goes around, comes around (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually flush shit down the toilet, not feed it to my dog. What goes around, comes around. I predict there will be a backlash against the sleaziest of these direct marketing firms and the slime that hire them. I already refuse to deal with companies that make me play touch-tone tag on their badly designed voice systems.
Re:can't they get a fucking clue (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bah! It won't make a difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:can't they get a fucking clue (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:STOP BUYING. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam and telemarketing works because of idiots.
Idiots, yes, but I think a lot of their sales come from the elderly. When people's minds start to weaken with age or illness, they become easy targets for these scumbags. My grandparents were constantly being tricked into buying useless stuff over the phone before they went to the nursing home. I don't mind telemarketers calling me so much, I like messing with them sometimes, but it really infuriates me to see them prey on old people.
When even that doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
One sleazy spammer tactic is to target a domain and autogenerate a zillion possible email addresses, in what's called a Rumpelstiltskin attack. If you have an email alias common or simple enough that you couldn't use it as a password, then it's vulnerable. If it's on some high-profile provider like Hotmail, it will be attacked.
Advertising as a substitute for Service (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
Rough translation: "we will advertise at you by any and all legal means available, no matter how annoying we have to be." I do sometimes wonder if there isn't a viable place for, "just concentrate on giving the customer good service," in this world. Nobody seems to believe in that quaint old idea anymore.
Re:STOP BUYING. (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop buying stuff from the companies that do this. Bottom line. Spam and telemarketing works because of idiots.
Alternatively, shoot all the idiots. And the elderly. And the naive. And the uneducated. And those who should have known better.
And when you and me are left...then cold calling us won't work!
Of course, perhaps it will be easier to stop the telemarketers from calling, rather then stopping people being people (ie idiotic).
My phone number is my property! (Score:3, Insightful)
Howizzit telemarketers don't grasp this concept? Howizzit the lawmakers fail to? Whyizzit we have to finely craft laws such as the don't-call-list to leave loopholes so I still have to hang up on the statetroopers whoopee fund. It is so demonstrably clear that my phone number is mine and using it is not free speech. Leaving the loophole is like leaving a loophole that says it is okay for the local repugnican party to put "elect tusch" signs in my yard.
And same argument goes for my email address. It's mine, I pay good money to my cable company to have it.
Oddly, snail mail doesn't trespass in the same way. The marketer has to pay to for their soon-to-be-trash to be brought to my house. Then again, I do have to pay to have it hauled away.
NO KIDDING!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
If I remember correctly, the bar graphs summed up to something around $10 billion (yes, $10,000,000,000) dollars anually.
So, if $10 billion is being spent on telemarketing, how much are people buying to make that expenditure worth while?
Somewhere, oh somewhere, there are those idiots spending ATLEAST $10 fucking-billion dollars a year to keep these dickheads calling us at dinnertime!
Junkmail? Make 'em pay (Score:2, Insightful)
Just make sure it doesn't have your name on it. Duh.
Re:can't they get a fucking clue (Score:2, Insightful)
When we decide we want to live in caves again?
Without people selling you stuff, you'd only have available to you what your skills can produce. Can you build good furniture? Can you build a stereo? Can you build a phone? Can you build (as in, from the transistors up) a computer? A fan? A heater? Hell, with your current skills can you even be sure that you'd have running water?
Giving up consumerism means every man must learn everything. If it takes 7 years to get a PhD in something, and a year to become expert at building it, the average man will only accomplish 8 things in their lifetime (well, actually about 3 unless you learn to operate on yourself).
And, before I hear we could become communists/socialists, consider this: ANY time you take ANYTHING from someone else, in exchange for anything (in the case of communism, in exchange for your labour, indirectly), you are consuming (in the economic sense).
Now, that all being said, people selling you stuff doesn't ALWAYS mean people advertising to you. It's just a byproduct of the process, and it's your job to decide where the limit is with your wallet.
Re:sociopaths!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
You do realize, right, that this is a very bad idea? I mean, how many valid e-mail addresses would you get by harvesting this list? When's the last time you saw a spammer who cared about the rules (or the law)?
Re:Junkmail? Make 'em pay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why don't they get it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sociopaths!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't seem to understand that we don't want their stuff. It doesn't matter how loud they shot, how annoying they are, or how many times they try to deliver their message--we aren't going to buy their products.
Re:Business Reply Mail (Score:1, Insightful)
Not at all.
1.) Welcome to capitalism.
2.) Actually, the real hypocrisy would be to support a company's bad practice, simply because of who that company is. (Sort of like complaining about anything Microsoft does, just because you don't like them...so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this subtle point is lost on the Slashdot readership.)
3.) When a company does something I like (good magazine), I will support them (buy it). When a company does something I dislike (BRM), I will object (mail them). There's no inconsistency, whatsoever.
Re:That's not what the story says... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:National DNC overhyped (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:STOP BUYING. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll admit that it is really crappy that some people try to take advantage of selling bogus items to elderly, and those people are scum. But this doesn't mean you should treat all telemarketers like dirt and 'mess' with them.
For about 3 months I made calls for my University trying to get donations to different projects (Yes I was paid). And it was just a job, a crappy one, but I needed the money to help me get through school. The people who are calling you just have crappy jobs and probably really need the money, they aren't calling you up specifically just to piss you off.
If you don't want to talk to the person, and don't want to be called again, interupt them and say "Remove me from your calling list" and hang up. I would hate it when people messed with me. Yes you can dick around with the person on the phone and make them sound like an idiot, but that is because they aren't allowed to talk back, or argue against you. But the person calling also can't hang up the phone on you, so they (or I as the case was many times) just has to sit and listen to a person yell at them for x ammount of time until they finally got bored, realized I wouldn't hang up.
Making fun of the telemarketer calling you is like punching someone who has their hands tied, and isn't allowed to run away. You can do it really easily, but I wouldn't say it's something to be proud of. If you really have a problem with getting a call from the company, ask to talk to their manager and duke it out with one of the people more responsible for you recieving the call in the first place, not the poor sob who is just trying to make a few bucks from a crappy job.
Re:sociopaths!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
If this was really true, it would have stopped already.
-- james
Vandalism in the Zoo ( actually on topic ) (Score:3, Insightful)
The people spoke amongst themselves and the City Council and it came to be that the zoo would no longer be free. We would have ticket counters and an admission fee. We knew the troublemakers would go somewhere else if they had to pay to get in, and if they were caught misbehaving, they would have to pay again if they wanted back in. It worked. We hated to lose our "free" zoo, but it had to be.
I hate to think of internet mail-server routing services no longer being free, but we may well get pushed into this because it may be less expensive to deal with a payment system than it is to deal with spam.
At least one advantage I can think off right off the bat with a payment system is that someone pays... that means someone is accountable for what got sent, and if fraud is involved, there is a direct monetary theft involved. A shopping mall can haul you into court over a shoplifted candy bar. So even if the payment is not much, it *is* a payment and incurs accountability.
It really bugs me to be forced into this train of thought, as I would much rather consider infrastructures to be public property. But, like the zoo, a pricing strategy may have advantages for controlling unruly pests.
Re:sociopaths!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
If there was a proper law that explicitly made it illegal for MakeMoneyFast.com to send UCE, and also provided penalties for companies (or their agents) who hire spammers to advertise on their behalf, then the business of spam for hire would suffer.
Plus, how hard is it for professional spammers to find valid email addresses? Since email is a communications application your email address has to be public to some degree in order to be useful. Even if you control access to your email address it can be leaked by anyone you ever communicated with. I get plenty of spam that I know was generated as a result of communication with customers or vendors - some unethical person (maybe even the postmaster) at one of those sites sold the list of addresses.
Re:National DNC overhyped (Score:4, Insightful)
This is called the "White Pages." It's how you get in contact with people.
It doesn't exist yet because the DNC list doesn't go into effect for 3 more months! It would be kind of silly to have a complaint center that receives complaints about things that aren't yet illegal.
Currently, under the telecommunications privacy act, you must pursue legal action against law-breaking telemarketers in small claims court, and with all of that information (and more!)
-1, Godwin (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah yes, the infamous Nuremberg defense. Historically it has a poor success rate, you might want to switch to the Chewbacca defense - I hear that works.
Re:sociopaths!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's great, seriously. It is nice to know that there is a market for people in the telemarketing business so that they don't all lose their jobs. I do believe, however, that the enormous early adoption of the federal do-not-call list appears to be early evidence that this market is much smaller than many in the direct marketing industry would like to admit.
--K.
Re:RReaahh (Score:3, Insightful)
The system they used had a voice recognition system, similar to a modem. Some modems will hear a voice when they dial and send the message VOICE CALL to the terminal and hang up rather than bug the shit out of someone with modem tones in case you dialed a wrong number.
There may be other methods such as you describe but I personally witnessed the voice recognition system, it switched the line to an operator as soon as it recognized a human voice.
As for having the SIT tones on several times, they are there just for redundancy, just in case the system didn't catch them the first time due to system lag or line noise, or whatever.
As for other people having to listen to it, my friends and family know. If they get the tones they know I'm not in the house and they just call my cell phone. If they don't have my cell phone number they aren't important to me and I don't care if they ever call again.
And I don't waste my time on assholes. I have a LARGE LCD caller ID on the wall that I can see clearly. When the phone rings I glance up at it, if it's someone I know I pick up and talk to them, if it's not, I just go about my business and let the answering machine take care of it. I have the volumed muted on it so I don't even bother to do audio screening.. I simply don't care... I have better things to do than waste my time arguing with toilet scum telemarketers..
Used to work as a telemarketer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:STOP BUYING. (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as the elderly population goes, I think that they simply have the tendancy to listen more often to a caller while, mostly everybody else just hangs up right away. Once they hear the sales pitch then they're hooked, not because they're slow old folks or anything like that, but just because the sales pitches are actually that effective. Humor me for a second, and actually pretend to be interested in what a telemarketer has to say next time one calls, then throw all your objections at him/her, and see how hard it is to say "no." Oh well, flame me if you must, but it's just food for thought.
Re:Bah! It won't make a difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a HORRIBLE analogy. The TV doesn't automatically turn itself and start pitching for used cars, and when I decide to watch TV, I'm well aware that for that benefit I may be subjected to annoying commercials.
By contrast, I can't decide when a telemarketer will call me, and when they do I get no benefit at all. There are no excuses, no justifications for harrasing people in their own homes.
SPAM and telemarketers are not the equivelent of commercials on television and radio because they provide NO benefit to the consumer. The consumer decides which show they want to watch and listen, the consumer IS REQUESTING content that the commercials are helping to pay for. THERE IS NO ANALOGY between commercials and telemarketers, NONE.
As far as being a constitutional issue, on this point I have to agree somewhat, but I do not feel it limits or restricts free trade. Businesses don't have the right to anything (as someone else pointed out, individuals have rights, not companies), let alone harrasing marketing. But even still, the representatives from our states are the ones who made this a law - that part of the constitution is there so that no state is given an unfair advantage, and this law doesn't change that.
Frankly, there should be more privacy laws enacted and enforced - things like callers being REQUIRED to indentify themselves, and a requirement for operating a phone company should be that they must carry all caller identification information (and not allow it to be blocked).