How many door to door salesman do you encounter? Where do you live, if you can share?
I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.
On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.
Jehovah's Witnesses, across Europe, still even nowadays. Some other minor religious sects targeting elderly, usually offering care or attention followed by vicious takeover of real estate.
Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)
I know JWs go door to door but I don't think they sell anything nor do they ask for donations - all their stuff is free? To qualify as a salesman you'd have to be selling something, surely?
My local C of E cathedral sent out a mailshot during COVID asking for donations with a range from £50 - £1000 options on the card (yes, really). I've never had anything like that from JWs.
I get visits from the local air ambulance team looking for donations but I'd classify them as a charity, not a salesman. Even though the person is under contract (employed) to do the task of going door to door, it would be a charitable engagement and not a sale. I asked the last guy if he got commission - he said no.
I understand the sentiment but I don't understand why you're shouting a response at me; I was trying to highlight the difference between charities and salesmen.
I think your issue is with religion, not sales people, which is what this article is about.
Yes of course. But I was saying of the people I've had at my door, only some have been trying to sell things, which is what a "salesman" is.
The guy from the local baptist church gave me a some book about being saved by Jesus (it had instructions on how to pray I think? dunno threw it away) but he didn't ask me for any money.
By contrast, the Lithuanian girl who was trying to sell religious books (no idea who they were - some encyclopedias? it was very odd) was trying to sell them to me (nice girl, had come to this country and was living in a dorm? was confused why UK taps had hot/cold separately instead of a combined tap). The guys scamming me about a roof repair were definitely not doing it free. Nor were the guys trying to get me to switch internet provider, nor the guy offering me window replacement and double glazing, nor the woman selling me "lucky lavender", nor the guy selling sponges and cleaning products for tiny amounts of change.
That's what I was saying - people who ask for money or donations are salesmen. People who don't, aren't.
Nuisance religious callers and general unsolicited visitors is another topic. The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
In the UK the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is the register for saying "I don't want unsolicited live sales or marketing calls". "Making you aware of" on behalf of a business is a marketing call, so there is no "loophole" to fix.
If the business ignores the rules, there is little that can be done legally.
UK law differentiates between businesses, charities and individuals. I do not know how it is done in other countries, but in the UK you can't pretend that a lone individual ringing you is a "marketing" call, no matter how much you dislike the other person or their topic. If it is a person ringing on behalf of a business, it's a business or marketing call, and therefore subject to TPS.
I do not know how registered charities (not businesses) relate to TPS. I haven't received a call from a charity that I can remember, but my grandma once did get a call from the RSPB whose telehandler seemed oblivious to her having suffered a stroke with speech difficulties, and subsequently arranged for a boatload of bird seed and pamphlets for her to distribute (which would be impossible!).
TPS also does not apply to individuals, which is why any individual can lawfully ring someone else, unless the calls are repeated (harassment), but again that doesn't fall under TPS.
You can become "ex-directory" to stop your number being listed, but this doesn't stop organisations just iterating phone numbers incrementally hoping to find someone.
For visitors to your door, you can put a sign up. I have. It stops all visitors. I also have a video doorbell so I can decide whether I bother answering the door.
I'm pretty sure that would fall under freedom of religion rights, and it couldn't be banned. Especially as proselytizing is a well known and well established religious practice.
I'm personally atheistic, and thus have no religious practices whatsoever. However, just like it's legal to build churches, to ring church bells, to wear visible religious imagery, it's also legal and highly protected to talk to others, even strangers, about your religious beliefs (or lack thereof).
What other kind of infantilizing laws do you purpose? Perhaps they should also make it illegal for people to interact with you if you find unpleasant? Ban small talk at checkouts?
A business can call another business it there’s an existing relationship. This means you can introduce an upgrade, a new product line, or something unrelated to their current contract - but the contract needs to be there first.
Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.
It's not about scams, it's about commercial telemarketing calls.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
> the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The problem with spoofing is that there are legitimate uses of it. It's probably solvable by only allowing spoofing of numbers you actually own (so if a hospital has 20 phone lines, they can spoof their publicly posted phone number, but random spammers can't spoof your neighbour's phone number).
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public
international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
It's not that they don't care, it's just that the protocol behind it was never designed for it.
Compared for example to email where when you want to send email to somebody, you discover its MX settings on the DNS level and then send it directly and the receiver can verify are you allowed to send those emails. With phone calls it's basically a network of interconnects so I'm sending the call directly to my provider but that provider to reach the destination has multiple steps and they have to trust each other with the numbers signalling. Compare it to a regular snail mail where everybody can write anything as a sender.
What most of the providers are switching to now is for enduser the case is if the phone number that you want to signal is not registered with us, you are not allowed to signal it. Which is fine and covers most of the cases but imagine that you are a business and have multiple providers And you have boughta number block with one provider and another one is offering you better minute price for outgoing calls. Or you want to have a forwarding to your cell phone number. Or you want to signal your number when you're calling prospects from CRM. The regulation usuall differs from country to country, but most allow you to signal any number that you own with any provider that you use. And this is correct, but the problem is verification.
Whatever the issue is, they should figure out a system that can't be abused by scammers. Failing that, I'm totally fine with also blocking companies that have their own reasons to spoof numbers.
All of the problems are solvable though, and if they weren't then it would still be better to make a hospital just use a few different numbers rather than allowing a billion dollar scam industry to operate unchecked.
>when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
This is good but not far enough. They should not show up as "private number" they should simply now show up at all. After some time, any networks that even allow spoofed outgoing calls should be disconnected from the phone system.
This seems so much of a no-brainer to me due to scammy calls to elderly and pure time loss responding to calls it is interesting not much has been done about it in other countries. I guess the telemarketers have a good lobby.
In my experience, GDPR works wonders here. After saying I do not wish my personal information to be processed and revoke any consents a few times I do not receive these calls anymore.
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
The whitelist managed by the government is not a bad idea.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
Have you tried call screening? I know for sure apple phones can do this but I believe some android phones can too?
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling”
The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
There we go again, technical solutions that doesn't actually solve the problem, yet works for the individual with the right technology :)
Jokes aside, besides just outlawing telemarketing as a whole, there are "bigger" solutions that can help more, like the opt-in "do not call" registries that bunch of countries have, that actually work, and works across landline/mobile phones, regardless of OS or manufacturer :) I'm not sure those lists exists in every country, but every country I've lived in (so far) has had a variant of those, that works.
At the other side of the spectrum (they are mostly annoying, I agree) how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?
Advertising is such a zero sum game as well. The only reason companies have to cold call market is because their competitors are cold calling. So you have to participate to keep up. If no one can do it, no one is getting a leg up over the rest.
You’re making a lot of assumptions. What is the cost benefit for cold calling? You could conceivably be better off letting the competition bleed. But I suspect a legit cost benefit analysis is hard to come by, mostly because marketing sells itself to management first.
As a consumer, I don’t want you to find me. I’ll find you when I need you.
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
As someone who used to be in SaaS sales selling a complex platform, this might be the case for you if you're constantly doing a lot of research and keeping up with the market, but it's not for the vast majority of others. I can't tell you how many software engineers and leaders I cold called who thought our platform did one thing, but was surprised to learn we GA'ed a different capability, and then they'd mention they were talking about that with their team in standup recently, and then they'd take a meeting.
Again, not doubting there are people like you out there who stay up to date with vendors, but there was a lot of useful education being done in those cold call connects. That company still employs an army of BDRs doing the same thing today.
I’ve never gotten a cold call for a quality, useful product. It’s either scams or scam-adjacent.
Same thing with door-to-door salespeople. Seems like in the past the percentage of people selling useful stuff like cleaning products, Avon, or yard service was higher. Now it seems to be out of town companies selling solar scams, roof inspection, or some other multi-thousand dollar thing sold via high-pressure sales.
I wonder how much we even need international calls from unknown numbers.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
In the EU its not uncommon to receive phone calls from other countries. Just the other day I received a large package and the driver called with an international number to make sure I would be home to receive it.
Delivery companies would adapt and drivers would have work-only dumb phones with correct country SIMs. Problem is, spam & scam callers would adapt as well.
I dont think unknown numbers should be allowed at all, esp for business. I think its a reasonable requirement that if a business wants to call someone they are willing to identify them self.
Yeah, Spain went this route. We used to get telemarketing calls from random mobile phone numbers (or straight up "hidden" number), so was hard to really know where they came from, unless the person admitted it in the phone call. A year or so that was made illegal, and now every "unwanted telemarketing" call has to come from a landline with a regional code, or the toll-free numbers, which leads to them actually having to register first, so easier to crack down on the ones that don't follow the "anti-spam" lists like Lista Robinson and similar, or break the rules in other ways.
Yeah, same, sadly the law makes exceptions for companies who already have existing relationships with you, but at least then you can vote against these sort of spam calls with your wallet.
How long you've been on Lista Robinson by the way?
> In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally.
There are a ton of us who are from one country, but moved to another, maybe more in EU than other places (not sure), but I really wouldn't say it's uncommon or even out of the ordinary. And I think most of us in this situation, have received/made international calls at least once in our life.
I think its way different in the EU vs the USA. In the United States, the number of people with passports HAS dramatically increased in the past 30 years, going from ~5% to a little more than 50%; but we mainly use them for traveling once or twice / getting into bars when you’re a 22yo with a misplaced driver’s license.
More relevant to the topic at hand, it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code. So I’m sure when an immigrant in the US gets an unknown call from their home country code, they can be pretty sure the call’s intentional and worth answering
> it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code.
Can't be THAT rare, can it? Isn't 15% of the current population in the US immigrants? Most of us immigrants do receive and make calls to our "mother country" every once in a while, even introverts like me. Or maybe you were excluding immigrants in that as you mention immigrants later?
There's multiple scenarios where this has occurred to me:
1. when travelling, hotels or car rentals may need to call or update me with some information
2. friend/family member was abroad and had issues with its own phone
3. some service I was paying for had customer care in a different country
4. buying something from a seller abroad, especially in the nicher categories (like a custom made standing desk) required the seller to call me a bunch of times
I hardly ever get international spam calls. Nowadays they seem to mostly come from domestic (Dutch) numbers in the range reserved for mobile phones. When answering the line is silent for two or three seconds (a lot of internet round-trips to somewhere in Asia, I imagine) before hearing call center background noises and a heavily accented English voice saying Hello and trying to pronounce my name. At which point I hang up, so I have no idea what comes after that. :-)
There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
> I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
Not in the domain at all but wasn't this the purpose of STIR/SHAKEN but the biggest blocker was that large telcos hadn't deployed it? I think Android and iOS dialer app show you whether there was Caller ID Verification done or not so you may be able to drop anything unverified.
In France, thanks to STIR/SHAKEN, this is not possible any more for the fixed phone numbering plans (and telemarketers have to register their phone numbers in a subset of this numbering plan). For mobile lines, this is still not 100% implemented due to the difficulty of handling roaming, but I think it is becoming efficient as I didn't have a telemarketer with a mobile number since a long time (they seem to hide their number now).
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
That's where we can actually use technical solutions though: businesses shouldn't be able to place calls without cryptographically signing their origination with a key derived from their business registration.
Phone calls are essentially end to end voip these days so we have the ability to deliver that metadata.
Here in Denmark there is no block list, but you have to explicitly opt-in to receiving telemarketing calls. By default, it's illegal to call you.
I never opt-in to anything. If I do get a call, I usually ask for the callers employee name and employee ID, their supervisors name and employee ID and the name of the company. Then I point out that it is illegal to call me and ask for them to get my name off their list.
It's been years since I've gotten any sort of telemarketing or survey call.
Most EU countries implemented registration of every mobile number with personal details and national id number. Yet in the same countries there exist entire office buildings with tens of people receiving salaries for spam/scam/cold calling, and they are fully anonymous?!
>The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
Anti-spam measures work by increasing cost and friction for spammers, not by stopping them completely. A burner LLC costs more than a burner SIM card, so it's a step in the right direction.
In some countries, it is illegal to make unsolicited calls to a number that is on an official "do not call" list.
Any number on that list is effectively a honeypot. I guess you could even distribute an app that automates the whole process: put your number on the list, log incoming calls, aggregate the data and report them in batches large enough to catch the government's attention.
Same for online ads. Ads should take you to a landing page saying Google served it for ShadyGambling Inc, Enemystan/Enemypur and clicking further will take you to Play Store.
And if they don't declare the name of the company? There are a lot of shady people out there. Plenty of them will happily call and give a fake name, or just something vague that sounds important, like, "This is Rachel from cardholder services".
So it turns out we really do need a technical solution, which is unforgeable and easily traceable access to the telephone network. Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.
Although STIR/SHAKEN is frequently described as a "caller ID authentication technology", it does not authenticate any caller ID per se. Instead, it authenticates the originating carrier, but that solves a different problem. [...]
It critically relies on a set of trusted certificate authorities (CAs) to manage digital certificates. In the USA, several telecom companies were appointed by the FCC as the CAs. They serve as the root of the trust. All other telcos, must not only trust these CAs but also pay them for compliance with STIR/SHAKEN, typically based on a percentage of their annual revenue. The reliance on trusted third parties severely limits STIR/SHAKEN to work across borders.
> Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.
The act requires FCC referrals to DOJ for willful robocall fraud. In the half-decade since enactment, with billions of scam calls and billions of dollars in consumer losses, the FCC made less than a dozen referrals.
At least a strategy to ignore unknown international numbers has much less collateral damage if any.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
Lista Robinson works great in Spain though, enroll there and enjoy the silence :) May take a month or two to really kick in, and if you've already enrolled but it's not working, check that the details are 100% correct. Worked both for me, my wife and tons of friends, although it takes time before it works.
I am on that list and have been for years but it doesn't help me at all. I did stop getting spam calls but not scams. Scammers are criminals anyway so they don't give a shit about that list.
I especially get a LOT of energy scams. They pretend to be from Endesa and they have my details somehow (some company must have provided it to them or it was leaked by a criminal employee).
They're usually calling from numbers in Mallorca or the Canaries. However in this day and age of VoIP you don't know where the hell they really are of course.
That's so strange, both me, my wife and friends and family had similar issues years ago, before I put everyone into Lista Robinson, and it worked for all of us, easily 10+ people throughout the years.
I wonder why it's so different between people. Does it depend on the region perhaps? We're all in Catalunya for what it's worth.
Maybe double-check the details, I remember for one person it didn't work at first, and the entered name had a typo, maybe it's really strict? Also try just say "Estoy en Lista Robinson" next time someone calls, makes them hang up quickly and blacklist your number at least within that company.
The easy explanation is that the lists don't work and you and your friends are just lucky to not get spam calls. Yet.
I also noticed a drop when the GDPR kicked in, but it doesn't solve the problem. It ironically just removes the "most benign" telemarketing from serious co's.
Marketing ruins everything it touches, from the public square to the internet and from the phone network to radio. I don’t know what the alternative is, but I don’t need one to see this is shit.
These would all help: well funded public broadcasting (for TV & radio); strongly enforced regulations for public advertising (public square); encouragement of open source & open standards; real anti-trust enforcement.
Most of the above exists - the problem is political & regulatory capture constantly undermines and weakens a lot of it.
Just easy ability to report would be enough. Then the govt can get to the phone number owner and make any middle men also responsible (in "tell us who was your client or pay the fine" way)
When I was getting a D&B number I missed their call I wasn't expecting because I wont answer unknowns and my phone blocks half the calls they think are spam anyway, then had to spend the better half of a week answering spam calls before finally getting what I needed.
I feel this could be solved by crowdsourcing, assuming the support from the major phone manufacturers and possibly governments.
- After a call from an unknown number concludes, the phone could offer an option to the user to mark it as "spam" (blocking the number in the history would have the same effect).
- The spam mark would then go into the central database. If a phone number was marked as "spam" too many times, it would no longer be able to ring the phone (maybe it gets diverted into the "spam folder", like e-mails).
Or am I being too naive here? What are the obstacles for something like this actually happening?
My google android phone already does this. I get basically no spam calls at all except very rarely. But I go to the spam tab in the phone app and I see there are dozens that got blocked
You cannot trust which number which is signalled to the end user.
Most spam calls I get is shown as legit numbers. If I call them back they will go to an innocent and unsuspecting user.
Google is already collecting this information and shows numbers as "probably spam". It is hard to enforce this harder even with collateral damage as you cannot trust the number which is signalled.
Legislation is in this case a good thing which might get the telcos to take this more seriously. This needs to be handled on an operator level. Nothing will happen without legislative incentives.
The world is run on SS7 which has a lot of problems which inertia and lacking incentives makes hard to overcome.
Again, please explain the details of what you're thinking. If I get a card number, type it into my POS system, collect money, and send you a product, who's going to stop me?
Wait, am I getting it right you're talking about collecting a prospective customer's card number and CVC over the phone, and then typing it yourself in a third party system?
Then it's trivial to settle: that's the big bad PCI DSS violation mouthful, so two to three things will happen. One, the customer's bank will reimburse them as soon as they complain that they have not authorized the fraudulent transaction that appears on their account. Product being sent, received, sent back, etc has no bearing on this. Two, you will be audited, fined $xx,xxx monthly and/or perhaps even get banned from the PSP layer. Again, sending real products has no bearing in this. Three, well the customer's own bank will be in touch pretty soon with yours to "settle things", as banks don't particularly like to advance reimbursements to their clients for fraudulent transactions. Hope you weren't using your own bank as a PSP as they kept receipts of everything you were doing (they just weren't looking until now).
We're not talking about fraud, we're talking about telemarketing.
The case you describe is correct for fraud, but doesn't need any new law making "void and nulls contracts made by phone". That being epolanski's proposed fix for telemarketing.
Well you were the one talking about "If I get a card number, type it into my POS system, collect money".
A PCI DSS violation is indistinguisable from fraud. If you collect random credit card numbers and then transact on them, you'll be harshly punished. Actually providing a service on the side of the fraud does not make the fraud disappear.
The proposed fix to make contracts established over inbound calls void is useful as a guide for the public to clearly know their rights. And if a company still chooses to collect a payment over the phone, now that's not only a PCI DSS violation but also a theft because money changed hands from an individual to a company without a valid contract.
I was talking about it in the context of a conversation with someone else, one easily available to you. It is frustrating to have someone not only give an irrelevant reply but then double down on the misunderstanding.
I’m not endorsing the idea, but we could ban printing the card number on the card. New cards would only have a CVV, chip, mag strip and some way to differentiate between 2 cards from the same company (a colored dot?).
The info would still be on the mag strip, but the vast majority of people would be unable to pay over the phone anymore. Or the internet.
I report the fraud to my card company. The card company reverses the charges and purses action against the fraudster if possible. The card company then tells me that because contracts made over the phone are null and void, using the credit card to make purchases over the phone is not allowed and doing it again will result in my account being closed or a penalty fee being assessed.
The long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card.
In Spain we have something called "Lista Robinson" (in Sweden exists something similar, called "NIX-registret") which are basically opt-in lists where you can enter your phone number, then once the new lists been distributed, the telemarketing companies cannot call you, if they're doing things properly. If they call anyway, you just mention you're on the list, they hang up, and remove your number from the list they have, eventually you stop getting calls.
I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already.
Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month.
If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.
We have a similar list in America [1] and Canada [2]. Unfortunately, like any regulation, its efficacy is only as good as its enforcement, so my understanding is they're both routinely ignored. Particularly grim for the Canadian case -
> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada
From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.
And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.
> From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
100% agree. When I said scam above, I meant the obviously illegal fraudulent scams (like the "We're MS, and see you have a virus, please give us your CC info and let us remote into your desktop" stuff).
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
I think the point is that there is a distinction between calls that are intrusive spam or arguably scams but not already illegal, and calls where the content of the call is itself unambiguously illegal.
Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.
A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.
In this context they're not the same thing. Calls from companies legitimately operating in the country need to obey laws or face enforcement (ideally, unless the government is asleep at the wheel) while calls from scammers outside of the country are breaking a bunch of laws anyways so who cares about violating a do not call list.
I consider marketing is a plague on attention and view it highly negatively - but in the case of tools to reduce unwanted phone calls there are some real differences in what's available to legitimate vs. scam callers and a do not call list can only ever be effective against people working within the system.
this experience will vary per region, telco and carrier network. some filter more advanced than others and some regions have more telemarketing than others based on the metrics they pull from it.
i get mostly robocalls from scam centres in india. most are filtered but some go through. 0 telemarketing.
If you have a policy of never giving these people the time of day, then it's no different
If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference
From context they mean pretending to be a legitimate law-abiding telemarketer who plans to use the do not call list for screening purposes when in fact they are an overseas telemarketer who plans to use the list as a cheap set of known working phone numbers.
The US and Canada also already have an outright ban on auto dialing and telemarketing calls to cellphones.
There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.
> Most countries have these no call lists but they are fairly useless as there is no enforcement
What country are you in that it doesn't work in? I know for a fact it works in Spain and Sweden, but it'll really depend on the country. You'd help by others by being a bit more explicit :)
> I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
That does suck and seems counter-productive indeed! Even more curious what exact country you're talking about now.
Dude, what country? In Spain or Sweden, I literally don't receive any calls from unknowns anymore, scammers nor telemarketing. Please specify the country so we can know what country you're talking about, and what the name of the list you enrolled in is.
Worth knowing for people who might not know; large telemarketing companies have campaigns on the internet to spread FUD about the effectiveness of these lists, so less people enroll. I'm not claiming that you is one of these, but unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
Whaaaat? On a American website, driven by a American VC company, are you sure? That has nothing to do with anything in the conversation...
If someone talks about "Most countries" they're not actually talking about some percentage of countries in the world generally, they're specifically talking about "most countries I know about", so when people start being fuzzy about those sort of details, it'd help all of us (not the ones from specific countries) actually understand what's going on and where. For all we know, they could be talking about India, especially since I've already added non-US context with my previous comment they themselves responded to...
why do you assume Spain and Sweden are representative and not the US or Canada? I'm curious how many people live in countries with effective versions of this list vs not
in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country. you could do it by prefix if you wanted to still use the list mechanically, maybe? But the only reason I see for an opt in list is to allow the marketing companies to still exist
> why do you assume Spain and Sweden are representative and not the US or Canada?
... I don't? I'm just want to know what country ferngodfather is talking about, as I'm sure the experience differs a lot by country, made evident by countless of comments in this submission.
> in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country.
I don't disagree with this, but for people suffering from these daily spam calls today, there might be ways to fix that, in a shorter time-frame than "petition the government, then propose a law, then get the law into agreement, then get the law into effect". If we're being clear about what countries people are talking about, there wouldn't be so much FUD about the subject.
I don't get scam calls, period. I don't think I never gotten scam calls either, and I my personal phone number is findable on the internet + every single email I send, been for decades at this point.
Maybe 5-6 years ago and before that, I used to get a lot of sales and telemarketing phone calls though, both from foreign and local landline and mobile phone numbers. Once I was on the list, and started just saying the name of the list, the calls eventually died down and today, I don't get a single spam call.
>unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
Why would a no-call list work well in one country but not others? I don't get it. At least explain what makes them work in Spain or Sweden if you are convinced they are the reason you don't get calls?
I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU. But even the GDPR doesn't stop scammers, and neither does any no-call list. Not in any country.
We're all on the "please don't rob me" list and robberies are still a thing.
> Why would a no-call list work well in one country but not others? I don't get it. At least explain what makes them work in Spain or Sweden if you are convinced they are the reason you don't get calls?
My parent (or parent-parent) comment made this clear, why a list in one country might work but in others not:
> I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too.
If there is no law about it, and no enforcement, then obviously such list would work less effectively than in countries where it is supported by a law somehow, and it is enforced.
> I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU
It has not, why would GDPR have an effect on the telemarketing companies, especially trans-EU ones? They're properly registered as controllers (otherwise they'd be shut down), and added more controls around the data they store. GDPR doesn't outlaw storing data, just controls how companies do so.
>It has not, why would GDPR have an effect on the telemarketing companies
The GDPR has fines up to 4% of the company's turnover if they contact people without consent or prior business reasons. If that doesn't work, then a "please don't call me" list where there are basically no consequences sure as hell won't.
> Maybe he's in France, since this article is about France having to ban all telemarketing calls since the block lists apparently don't work.
How on earth am I supposed to assume they live in France, just because that's in the submission article? Conversations in the comments regularly go beyond the scope of the article, and even the commentator themselves said "Most countries" so clearly they're talking about more than just one.
I think in America at least the problem is most of these seem to be scams calls not legitimate. So they are criminals who don’t really care about the law
In Canada that list is used by foreign telemarketers to spam us. Our enforcement authorities just shrug and say the criminals are not in our jurisdiction. That being said, my phone is pretty good at stopping it.
How do you know that a call that never reaches you was stopped by the no-call list as opposed to your number not being on the list of numbers to call today?
Me and others used to receive almost daily telemarketing calls. Once you enroll in the list and get the confirmation, you notice a drastic reduction in calls, and get maybe 2-3 per month. If you at that point start saying that you're on $NAME_OF_LIST to the companies who do still call, they say sorry, hang up, and you get less calls faster. This been the experience for 10+ people and myself who've used to get these calls, and no longer do.
The way the companies manage the lists, is basically that they have three types, they have huge unranked/unchecked lists of just numbers, one list of "good" numbers that are at least online, not on do-not-call lists, haven't recently been sold to already, and so on, then the group of blacklists essentially. Whenever the telemarketers work in their stations, the only numbers that even get dialed by the central robot for them, are the "good" numbers they've been assigned for their shift.
Not true. DND works great in India. You can also report a spam call or an SMS and your mobile network provider has to provide a resolution. They usually do it by banning that abusing number.
But don't they just "call" from a different number? Or a random number each time? There's no real verification on the number being called from - its specified _by_ the caller a lot of the time.
So unless the phone company starts banning phone companies that don't enforce correct caller id, it won't do anything.
> So unless the phone company starts banning phone companies that don't enforce correct caller id, it won't do anything.
But it evidently does do something, since now it's confirmed in these threads that at least 4 (possibly) more countries do have these lists, and they do work.
That just sounds like you don't actually have a "do not call" list, you have something that is trying to be a "do not call" list ;)
Speak with your local politicians to fix the issues that bothers you. They don't listen, out on the streets and protest. Same way civilians communicate with their governments in every other democracy :)
> Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.
You might want to cite something, rather than do this.
Everybody seems to pretend to be black Americans, whose freedoms weren't gained simply by protest, but by being beaten and having dogs sicced on them while protesting before cameras, and the shame that white people felt while watching that on television - and the pressure of "whataboutism" coming from the Russians that the USA was being judgemental about freedom while also being an apartheid state.
Other people have aped the black civil rights struggle (deemed the "civil rights" struggle), and it has amounted to middle class people walking in the streets, congratulating each other and socializing. I don't know of any accomplishments resulting from that.
Street protests were traditionally a show of force; an indication that an overwhelming number of people were on the edge of violence. They often ended in a lynching, or the burning down of a building. Black people did not have that option, so they just offered their bodies to television cameras - this was not traditional, this was new. The only model they had before that was Gandhi, and that was not a traditional Indian thing as many think, but an idea he took from Tolstoy.
Time to crack open a history book and find out why Baltimore was called Mobtown.
> Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
> Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
With that comes that protests can be successful, and the trick is to figure out why the protests you've gone to haven't been successful then, as they probably could have been, and then try to change it.
It's you, and many other people, but unless you all get together and do something, there will never be enough pressure for things to actually escalate. You cannot "stop then escalate", you put pressure until it escalates by itself. But the pressure thing is something that people need to actively participate in of course.
> Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
I don't really care about historical protests tbh, that's the past. They may have been effective at the time but that's a different context, with different values and virtues
We have to operate in today's environment which is one where protest is just viewed as a part of daily life, an annoyance to be tuned out, like walking past a homeless person on the sidewalk
And yes, some countries still seem to have effective protests. I just don't have a lot of confidence in the power of protest to overcome the power of lobbyists
Lobbyists can’t control you if you and 3%-20% of the country are in the road instead of doing the transactions or paperwork the ownership class wants you to be doing.
Google AI overview for Korea population breakdown: South Korea is one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries globally, with ethnically Korean people making up roughly 95% to 99%
Google AI overview for Canada population breakdown: Canada is not homogeneous; it is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Nearly one-quarter of people living in Canada were born outside the country.
Diversity is in fact not our strength. It keeps us fighting amongst ourselves while the lobbyists push government to do whatever they want
Not a very popular opinion, and probably going to earn me some ire, but oh well
In the US, the local politicians are often the ones doing the spamming at this point. They've even specifically exempted themselves from the do not call laws, it's absurd.
They can also legally bypass "no soliciting" signs at people's homes.
I have had some success in just asking the spam callers to remove me from their list. I still get a fair number of calls, but they are mostly blocked by Google's filter (though they do get sent to voicemail, which results in lots of 4 second silent messages).
The last few weeks it's been spammy text messages from politicians, though.
Same in Norway. I have been on the list for decades, and I never receive any unwanted calls – except from my mother (j.k love you mum!)
I am not sure why it works so well here. I have vague recollections of news articles about it being ignored in the past. I guess they just struck down hard on those. Also, I imagine if you put yourself on that list you would be really grumpy if someone called to try to sell you something.
I'm guessing (since Norway and Sweden tends to be more similar than different) that Norway also have something similar to the Swedish "Marknadsföringslagen" ("The Marketing Act") that effectively outlaws companies from calling people who obviously don't want to be called. They quite literally get fines if they call people on these lists, hence the companies actively cross-reference against them.
I've worked in cold-calling telemarketing in both Sweden and Spain in my previous life, both companies I worked for were deadly afraid of accidentally calling people on these lists, and actively instructed employees to basically say "Sorry", hang up and flag the number if someone mentioned the name of the lists.
It was the case in France too, it was called Bloctel; you just had to register your phone number and telemarketing companies had a legal obligation to look it up and not call you.
So it worked for a time, legit companies stoped calling; however most people didn't knew about Bloctel as it was little advertised.
Meanwhile, spam calls turned into scam calls, and a real issue especially with the elderly.
So I think that banning all unsolicited calling kills two birds with one stone, spam becomes illegal and scams as a consequence becomes easier to spot as there are no more unsolicited calls.
We have that kind of list in Italy too. I registered my number and I keep getting calls, so I stopped answering to numbers not in my contacts list. If I know that somebody will be calling me, I ask for the number and I add it to the list.
Have you tried answering and then just saying the name of the list you've enrolled in? Tends to help propagate to the companies that they absolutely should not call the number again. At least here the companies tend to actively self-moderate and cross-reference against the lists, as the law does get enforced. When I worked in cold-calling call centers in the past, I remember they being strict with teaching the "marketers" what to do when people brought up the local list(s).
For all these countries that don’t get scam calls, it has nothing to do with your do not call list since these are criminals anyway. It has to do with the fact that Americans are Legion and have a lot of money.
And perhaps also (unironically) more persuadable due to the rampant commercialism and historic openness (to ideas, strangers, everything) of their society.
>I guess it's my word against yours :) What should we do?
It only takes one example of someone on the list getting scam calls to prove they don't work. And also, no matter how many on the list are not getting calls it doesn't prove it was because of the list.
I need this. I've had bloody Freshworks calling me every single day for the past month, even though I ask them to remove me from their list every time. It doesn't matter if I ask nicely, whether I listen to their pitch or don't, whether I make threats, they still call.
I will never, ever, work with Freshworks, Freshdesk, Freshservice, or any of their other products as a direct result of this.
Look up what the name of the list is in your country, cite it the next time they call, and that you'll report them to <name of local agency> unless they cease, I'm sure they'll get the message :)
Most of the people doing cold-calling been trained to listen for the names of the lists, and have strict orders what to do with the number in case someone they call brings it up.
As crude as it sounds; try pulling a madman show. Cussing, screaming, threatening to go after them, completely loosing it. I suspect they have a field for notes in the agent database and will mark you as difficult or improbable lead, and stop calling.
Who wants these calls? It ends up that the people that don't know that these lists exist (my grandma) still receive these calls - so everyone who's likely to be baited in buying something they don't need for way too much money.
Also, it depends on the company keeping their word that they won't call you when you are on this list.
Nobody needs or wants these calls, they are always some company wanting to upsell you something you don't really need, they shouldn't be opt-out.
i put my number on the list and it worked great for a bit until spam calls started calling from outside the country. At least now I know not to answer calls from outside the country. I see a ton of people moved over to actual calls via whatsapp though.
Thanks for the information, I live in Sweden and get calls at least once a week, but it's annoying enough.
I visited family in Brazil and was shocked about how people there seem to get unsolicited marketing calls every hour or so!! My mom was forced to change her number to stop them as she nearly got scammed of several thousand dollars - sometimes the scams are extremely convincing - in this case they knew she was at a certain bank agency and who she talked to, so clearly it had inside involvement. Also, now with AI-cloning voice services, it's almost impossible to tell if the person on the other side is really who you think it is. Answering calls from unknown numbers is an absolutely no-no. Even from known numbers, you've got to be careful.
You know, this comment + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208950 ("sitting on my bench with the neighbor's calico meowing at me, when fully automatic gunfire would ring out") gives me the impression that the US really is a completely upside down country compared to most others out there, but people are just so used to it, they don't understand what kind of dystopian world they already live in every day.
Years ago when I first found Lista Robinson was because I felt like I received calls once a day and had to do something about it because it was too much. If I got 3-6 calls per day I'd think I'd get rid of my phone in total, I wouldn't want to have a phone at all if that happened :P Then some of the residents in the US are used to gunshots going off in their neighborhood, I just don't know what to think anymore...
Nix-registret is awesome! I didn't realise just how good it is until I transferred ownership of my number to my company, which automatically took me off the list(companies can't be in nix) which almost immediately made me regret owning a phone.
There are tax benefits to having the company foot the phone bill, but it's not worth it, currently.
How does it work, technically? In the US we have something that is supposed to be similar--put your number on a registry and telemarketers can't legally call you--but in practice we've just built a list of real phone numbers that telemarketers and scammers can use to target numbers that are owned by real people rather than brute-forcing the entire phone number space. If there is any enforcement at all, it's imperceptible.
I had to look it up, but it seems like you do a lookup per number before calling, and nixregistret will basically tell you if that number is in their register or not.
I'm not sure how enforcement works, from the copy on their website it seems like it's purely voluntary to even check there, but serious companies do because their customers will hate them forever if they call people who are registered.
I'm actually surprised it works so well given the apparent lack of enforcement. The only calls I ever get these days are from someone with an Indian accent who says "hello I'm calling from Blockchain", and even that has been a while!
Now it was decades ago I worked in cold calling telemarketing, but back then, the company basically purchased/subscribed to various lists of numbers they get from other companies, and also had lists of numbers to not call, either obtained from the do-not-call registries, or their own lists of "unsellable" customers, bad numbers and so on, simply crossed-references the ones that they for legal (or otherwise) shouldn't call, then the telemarketers who all sit in basically automated stations, end up just calling the "good" numbers. Different teams get different chunks of the numbers, but all the calls they're supposed to be doing, are supposed to not be on any of the do-not-call lists already.
The telemarketers themselves are told to basically hang up and mark the number as "do not call" if anyone picks up and says/mentions the name of lists. Most companies I knew from then took the lists seriously since their mechanism is based on actual laws in the countries, and evidently since I nor the people I enrolled in these lists receive marketing calls, the companies today takes them equally seriously.
Surprised that it was “Robinson” in Spain as well as Denmark, I had to look it up.
Apparently that name is used in germany, netherlands, Belgium and more. It stems from Robinson Crusoe, which of course makes sense, as he was disconnected from the world :)
Personal take: it has no real effect, as especially foreign spam/scam callers have no insight or interest in looking up the list. Any ban is welcome!
> Surprised that it was “Robinson” in Spain as well as Denmark, I had to look it up.
Hah, I was similarly surprised, especially since in Sweden where I come from, it's called the "NIX-registry" for no rhyme or reason. At least Robinson makes sense to me :)
in Netherlands you have 'bel me niet register' (dont call my registry) which makes it unlawful for legit telemarketing. but this is not about telemarketing only. there is many more spam. also the laws would only locally apply so international calls dont fall under it
In Germany it is assumed illegal without prior consent or with calling machines [0]. However, practically you get a few of those calls per week. Also often from international numbers.
I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.
The only limitation is cold hard cash. The phone companies make big bucks from telemarketers by providing an endless list of new numbers and multiple lines. The whole racket wouldn't work without the companies' greenlight.
Exactly. The same reason the bulk of paper mail is unsolicited garbage. The spammers/scammers are paying customers, without regulation the incentive for the phone company is to keep them flowing.
Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
Historically, in a world of analogue phone lines, spoofed phone numbers were a legitimate feature: if my business has more than one phone line, each of those lines is going to have its own distinct number; but I'm going to want outgoing calls from any of those lines to appear to originate from the same number (the one that I put on my promotional material, invoices, etc.).
Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).
The problem is that it's a network. The hard part of networking isn't the technology - it's the other people. And short of a government regulation or a monopoly, they'll never all agree.
STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.
Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.
On this topic, phone lines are so ubiquitous that it is irresponsible for representative governments to continue to let private companies mess around with them. Doubly irresponsible to go from public to private after the increase in popularity.
That was in the 2000s. Phone lines are an anomaly now but cellphones are not. The phone number is more like an ICQ number than an identifier of a physical connection, but is still regulated like the latter.
I've seen two reasons. 1) Backward compatibility--you would have to add an additional security layer, and some old legacy switching hardware (5% of the network?) wouldn't support this. 2) Phone companies profit from the calls, so they have no incentive to spend the money to upgrade and stop it.
The problem is not that the originator can be found. The current, existing, legacy, phone system already can find the exact originator.
The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".
Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.
But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.
AFAIK, the problem is that the system works like international mail used to.
There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.
Can't remember right now if it's a EU or a Spain thing, but here they made mandatory to use real numbers on the Caller ID, so you can't use fake or hidden numbers for telemarketing. That way, of you're abusing, your line can easily be tracked, blocked or fined.
There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .
It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.
Don't know if I'm missing something really important or it was genuinely hell on earth 10 years ago but in Spain I get shitspammed by scammers all the time. Android blocks most of them thankfully but some still slip through.
What I mean, is that normally, people go to the doctor and hospital for a whole host of reasons, and if the doctor never says "actually, that's nothing to worry about" or "the test was negative" then either maybe you're not going to the doctor enough, or your overall health is so bad you never get "good news" from the doctor when you go there.
But then I remembered that most people here are Americans, and you (if you're American, I'm assuming here) don't go to the hospital/doctor just because, as it costs so much, compared to the life I'm used to, where whenever there is a health worry, you go to the doctor/hospital and they say "don't worry, it's fine" most of the time.
Isn't the usual case for physicians and dentists appointment reminders? (I don't understand why utility companies need to interrupt my day, so I ignore that.) I wouldn't mind them being able to actually reach me about urgent things via phone, but I keep a calendar like a grown adult and appointment reminders do nothing for me except interrupt my day.
Why? What situations do you need a doctor to use a synchronous, interrupting, unscheduled communication medium for, where the situation is not serious enough for you to already be in the hospital?
My doctors can communicate asynchronously through the MyChart app/website (the app is fairly terrible, I would rather them just use email, but oh well) where I can read and respond when it makes sense for me. Any test that they are running where the results could be bad is already asynchronous (or I am in the hospital) so delaying a few hours in reading it doesn't seem like a big deal even if it is something bad.
A loved one being treated in the ER? A concerning test result turning up, requiring me to come in soon? A spot for a treatment I've been queueing for becoming available last-minute?
If the threat of an 999999 $£€ fine per call isn't enough.
I opted in to a block list and after a few months received much less calls, but still more than zero. I think that now that everyone is on the block list by default companies will have to be more careful and it will be easier to report any issue.
I think you may be overthinking it. In Sweden we already have a registry where we can opt out of telemarketing[1] (as well as ads in our physical mailboxes[2]). Generally this works well. Yes I still get a couple of "this is Microsoft calling" in Indian accent per year. Two spam calls per year isn't bad though. And this has worked for decades here, without special technical measures.
(Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.)
But how do you enforce this? It seems like most of the US spam calls originate from India. Do you have to get cooperation from Indian authorities? Seems unlikely since it's helping their economy? Do you put the burden on the phone company? I guess the phone companies make money from the calls, so they don't care?
Personally I think the trust model for phone calls has worn itself out. The network is too large, and the risk too great, for "guess this 10 digit number and you can call me any hour of the night" to be at all sustainable. In practice, if you aren't already in my contact list, my phone does not ring. (Otherwise it would be ringing all day long.) Telemarketers do seem to have realized that calling at night is unwise, for now. Relatives meanwhile...
I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.
> and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
They do this to themselves if they don't leave a voicemail or can't bother to send a text. 99.9% of the scammers and spammers never do, so it's a good filter.
The best technical solution I've seen is a spam review fee that turns into a reward and charged to the next closest originating peer.
For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account.
If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.
its unlikely going to be worth the costs involved for the telco to do this reviewing. perhaps AI systems and other filters could be used but ultimately its tons of time needed because audio takes time to play. a lot of cases will be clearcut instabans but for the ones that are not it requires all of them to be reviewed with _some_ depth and then some with much more.
its also prone to mistakes which is another process that needs to be managed etc.
from a consumer standpoint this sounds super good ofc tho.
Why? They get paid $10 every time spam is reported regardless of the outcome. Trained staff listening at 3x speed with AI assistance could classify 3 obvious spam calls in a minute. If you can't turn $1800/hr per employee into a profit center I don't know what to tell you. That's a lot of money to cover for extreme outliers.
Eventually the obvious spam callers would all quit and the volume would reduce to a handful of borderline cases. So the spam department wouldn't make a lot of money anymore, but the volume would be so low it would barely register.
They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers. If they don't cough up then you void your peering agreement. If they try to route around through a different trusted peer then that peer takes the hit. If its your own customers then you can do something about it. VOIP peers would quickly run into trouble and they'd probably require new customers to keep a spam deposit, carefully monitor their calls, and have a ramp up period that limits their outbound call rate and lifts it over time.
>They get the money from the peer networks that are the source of the spammers.
What peer networks? Vodaphone, AT&T or whatever the largest operator in India is? You're going to cut off India because someone there calls people claiming to be Microsoft selling antivirus protection? Refuse calls from AT&T?
Nah man, you're not. Also not from a customer that ordered 100 numbers last month and is defunct this month, leaving you with 100 000 confirmed spam calls to pay for.
If it was possible to simply charge the spammers money, this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
General white-list is likely useless as number spoofing is still easy and prevalent in North America. Scammers would just set their number to a trusted one. You wouldn't have to see the list to assume that numbers from hospitals, doctors, utility companies, etc. would be included - unless they all had separate secret numbers to call out from. Likely this would be unreasonable - especially considering they still aren't able to end number spoofing.
> A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Of course it would be abused, but a properly verified caller id system for all the big ones; the inland revenue, the major banks, would mitigate 9/10 scam calls I get each day.
Spam is generally defined as "unwanted and/or unsolicited communication". Which I'm pretty sure an unsolicited sales call, from a genuine business, still is.
I run a few small businesses and quite regularly get unsolicited emails/calls.
There's absolutely a real, qualitative difference between contact from a real human being who respects everyone's time and has done actual research, and someone who is just playing the numbers game and blasting as many people as they can (regardless of how "warm" the leads are).
It's a bit of a spectrum, but if someone has taken the time to handwrite and research an email or call, I'll at least try to give them the courtesy of a response.
481 comments
I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.
On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.
Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)
My local C of E cathedral sent out a mailshot during COVID asking for donations with a range from £50 - £1000 options on the card (yes, really). I've never had anything like that from JWs.
I get visits from the local air ambulance team looking for donations but I'd classify them as a charity, not a salesman. Even though the person is under contract (employed) to do the task of going door to door, it would be a charitable engagement and not a sale. I asked the last guy if he got commission - he said no.
I think your issue is with religion, not sales people, which is what this article is about.
Because then a marketing person could say "but I'm only trying to make you aware of $PRODUCT; I'm not trying to sell it!"
The guy from the local baptist church gave me a some book about being saved by Jesus (it had instructions on how to pray I think? dunno threw it away) but he didn't ask me for any money.
By contrast, the Lithuanian girl who was trying to sell religious books (no idea who they were - some encyclopedias? it was very odd) was trying to sell them to me (nice girl, had come to this country and was living in a dorm? was confused why UK taps had hot/cold separately instead of a combined tap). The guys scamming me about a roof repair were definitely not doing it free. Nor were the guys trying to get me to switch internet provider, nor the guy offering me window replacement and double glazing, nor the woman selling me "lucky lavender", nor the guy selling sponges and cleaning products for tiny amounts of change.
That's what I was saying - people who ask for money or donations are salesmen. People who don't, aren't.
Nuisance religious callers and general unsolicited visitors is another topic. The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
So someone calling you to "make you aware of $X" does not count as sales?
And they would be permitted to call you?
I hope they fix this loophole quickly!
If the business ignores the rules, there is little that can be done legally.
UK law differentiates between businesses, charities and individuals. I do not know how it is done in other countries, but in the UK you can't pretend that a lone individual ringing you is a "marketing" call, no matter how much you dislike the other person or their topic. If it is a person ringing on behalf of a business, it's a business or marketing call, and therefore subject to TPS.
I do not know how registered charities (not businesses) relate to TPS. I haven't received a call from a charity that I can remember, but my grandma once did get a call from the RSPB whose telehandler seemed oblivious to her having suffered a stroke with speech difficulties, and subsequently arranged for a boatload of bird seed and pamphlets for her to distribute (which would be impossible!).
TPS also does not apply to individuals, which is why any individual can lawfully ring someone else, unless the calls are repeated (harassment), but again that doesn't fall under TPS.
You can become "ex-directory" to stop your number being listed, but this doesn't stop organisations just iterating phone numbers incrementally hoping to find someone.
I do not know if you're in the UK, but you can see the definitions of problematic calls and what you can do according to OFCOM here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/scam-calls-and...
For visitors to your door, you can put a sign up. I have. It stops all visitors. I also have a video doorbell so I can decide whether I bother answering the door.
* Jehovah's Witnesses
* people offering to steam clean my roof/drive
* the local Fibre company trying to sign me up.
* well known scammers who claim to be on some kind of prison release scheme selling overpriced kitchen/household tat
Norway.
Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
E.g. in Finland the relevant regulation (https://traficom.fi/files/media/regulation/M_28_L_EN.pdf) says (in section 10):
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
Compared for example to email where when you want to send email to somebody, you discover its MX settings on the DNS level and then send it directly and the receiver can verify are you allowed to send those emails. With phone calls it's basically a network of interconnects so I'm sending the call directly to my provider but that provider to reach the destination has multiple steps and they have to trust each other with the numbers signalling. Compare it to a regular snail mail where everybody can write anything as a sender.
What most of the providers are switching to now is for enduser the case is if the phone number that you want to signal is not registered with us, you are not allowed to signal it. Which is fine and covers most of the cases but imagine that you are a business and have multiple providers And you have boughta number block with one provider and another one is offering you better minute price for outgoing calls. Or you want to have a forwarding to your cell phone number. Or you want to signal your number when you're calling prospects from CRM. The regulation usuall differs from country to country, but most allow you to signal any number that you own with any provider that you use. And this is correct, but the problem is verification.
This is good but not far enough. They should not show up as "private number" they should simply now show up at all. After some time, any networks that even allow spoofed outgoing calls should be disconnected from the phone system.
And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too
But not everyone wants to be sorta legal.
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling” The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
Jokes aside, besides just outlawing telemarketing as a whole, there are "bigger" solutions that can help more, like the opt-in "do not call" registries that bunch of countries have, that actually work, and works across landline/mobile phones, regardless of OS or manufacturer :) I'm not sure those lists exists in every country, but every country I've lived in (so far) has had a variant of those, that works.
You don't.
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
Again, not doubting there are people like you out there who stay up to date with vendors, but there was a lot of useful education being done in those cold call connects. That company still employs an army of BDRs doing the same thing today.
Same thing with door-to-door salespeople. Seems like in the past the percentage of people selling useful stuff like cleaning products, Avon, or yard service was higher. Now it seems to be out of town companies selling solar scams, roof inspection, or some other multi-thousand dollar thing sold via high-pressure sales.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
How long you've been on Lista Robinson by the way?
There are a ton of us who are from one country, but moved to another, maybe more in EU than other places (not sure), but I really wouldn't say it's uncommon or even out of the ordinary. And I think most of us in this situation, have received/made international calls at least once in our life.
More relevant to the topic at hand, it’s extremely rare to receive an unsolicited call to an American phone number from a number outside the +1 country code. So I’m sure when an immigrant in the US gets an unknown call from their home country code, they can be pretty sure the call’s intentional and worth answering
Can't be THAT rare, can it? Isn't 15% of the current population in the US immigrants? Most of us immigrants do receive and make calls to our "mother country" every once in a while, even introverts like me. Or maybe you were excluding immigrants in that as you mention immigrants later?
Surely this would be covered by the fact that you're making calls as a "known number" not an "unknown number"?
1. when travelling, hotels or car rentals may need to call or update me with some information
2. friend/family member was abroad and had issues with its own phone
3. some service I was paying for had customer care in a different country
4. buying something from a seller abroad, especially in the nicher categories (like a custom made standing desk) required the seller to call me a bunch of times
I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
Even if there's no explicit laws around that, who's getting billed for the calls?
Phone calls are essentially end to end voip these days so we have the ability to deliver that metadata.
I never opt-in to anything. If I do get a call, I usually ask for the callers employee name and employee ID, their supervisors name and employee ID and the name of the company. Then I point out that it is illegal to call me and ask for them to get my name off their list.
It's been years since I've gotten any sort of telemarketing or survey call.
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
I wonder how enforceable that France thing will be
What do you report to the police if the act isn't illegal?
Any number on that list is effectively a honeypot. I guess you could even distribute an app that automates the whole process: put your number on the list, log incoming calls, aggregate the data and report them in batches large enough to catch the government's attention.
So it turns out we really do need a technical solution, which is unforgeable and easily traceable access to the telephone network. Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.
We have that, but it's insufficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN#Limitations
> Plus robust enforcement of consumer laws, something wildly out of fashion in the US.Quite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRACED_Act#Criticism
First, I am 100% for this legislation, but, as has been mentioned numerous times, here, it needs to be enforced.
We probably also need to marry it with a technical solution, that ensures that unverified numbers cannot be used (no spoofing possible).
Maybe a national "blacklist" of bad numbers, with a "three strikes and you're out" kind of thing.
But, human nature, that nasty old spoiler, is likely to raise its ugly head. I suspect this would be a great place for corruption to take hold.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
I especially get a LOT of energy scams. They pretend to be from Endesa and they have my details somehow (some company must have provided it to them or it was leaked by a criminal employee).
They're usually calling from numbers in Mallorca or the Canaries. However in this day and age of VoIP you don't know where the hell they really are of course.
I wonder why it's so different between people. Does it depend on the region perhaps? We're all in Catalunya for what it's worth.
Maybe double-check the details, I remember for one person it didn't work at first, and the entered name had a typo, maybe it's really strict? Also try just say "Estoy en Lista Robinson" next time someone calls, makes them hang up quickly and blacklist your number at least within that company.
I also noticed a drop when the GDPR kicked in, but it doesn't solve the problem. It ironically just removes the "most benign" telemarketing from serious co's.
Most of the above exists - the problem is political & regulatory capture constantly undermines and weakens a lot of it.
- After a call from an unknown number concludes, the phone could offer an option to the user to mark it as "spam" (blocking the number in the history would have the same effect).
- The spam mark would then go into the central database. If a phone number was marked as "spam" too many times, it would no longer be able to ring the phone (maybe it gets diverted into the "spam folder", like e-mails).
Or am I being too naive here? What are the obstacles for something like this actually happening?
Most spam calls I get is shown as legit numbers. If I call them back they will go to an innocent and unsuspecting user.
Google is already collecting this information and shows numbers as "probably spam". It is hard to enforce this harder even with collateral damage as you cannot trust the number which is signalled.
Legislation is in this case a good thing which might get the telcos to take this more seriously. This needs to be handled on an operator level. Nothing will happen without legislative incentives.
The world is run on SS7 which has a lot of problems which inertia and lacking incentives makes hard to overcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7
I wonder why Orange so far doesn't support built-in iOS SMS/Call Reporting feature with that app
Do so, and 99% of telemarketers no longer have the incentive to call anybody.
I'm a telemarketer who calls you up, sells you on something, and charges your card.
What changes in that scenario?
Then it's trivial to settle: that's the big bad PCI DSS violation mouthful, so two to three things will happen. One, the customer's bank will reimburse them as soon as they complain that they have not authorized the fraudulent transaction that appears on their account. Product being sent, received, sent back, etc has no bearing on this. Two, you will be audited, fined $xx,xxx monthly and/or perhaps even get banned from the PSP layer. Again, sending real products has no bearing in this. Three, well the customer's own bank will be in touch pretty soon with yours to "settle things", as banks don't particularly like to advance reimbursements to their clients for fraudulent transactions. Hope you weren't using your own bank as a PSP as they kept receipts of everything you were doing (they just weren't looking until now).
The case you describe is correct for fraud, but doesn't need any new law making "void and nulls contracts made by phone". That being epolanski's proposed fix for telemarketing.
A PCI DSS violation is indistinguisable from fraud. If you collect random credit card numbers and then transact on them, you'll be harshly punished. Actually providing a service on the side of the fraud does not make the fraud disappear.
The proposed fix to make contracts established over inbound calls void is useful as a guide for the public to clearly know their rights. And if a company still chooses to collect a payment over the phone, now that's not only a PCI DSS violation but also a theft because money changed hands from an individual to a company without a valid contract.
The info would still be on the mag strip, but the vast majority of people would be unable to pay over the phone anymore. Or the internet.
The long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card.
This already happens almost reflexively.
> long term effect may be that credit card companies stop supporting remote transactions that don't use biometrics+attestation or the physical card
Then I drop that card and switch to a competitor who doesn't do this.
I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already.
Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month.
If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.
> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List
And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.
A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.
I consider marketing is a plague on attention and view it highly negatively - but in the case of tools to reduce unwanted phone calls there are some real differences in what's available to legitimate vs. scam callers and a do not call list can only ever be effective against people working within the system.
i get mostly robocalls from scam centres in india. most are filtered but some go through. 0 telemarketing.
I replied, "Stop providing politicians exemption to spam constituents." Strangely, they didn't respond.
I suppose many people would wonder what the difference is between a legitimate caller you don't want and a fake one.
If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference
There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.
I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
What country are you in that it doesn't work in? I know for a fact it works in Spain and Sweden, but it'll really depend on the country. You'd help by others by being a bit more explicit :)
> I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!
That does suck and seems counter-productive indeed! Even more curious what exact country you're talking about now.
Worth knowing for people who might not know; large telemarketing companies have campaigns on the internet to spread FUD about the effectiveness of these lists, so less people enroll. I'm not claiming that you is one of these, but unless we're being clear what lists/countries we're talking about here, it's borderline FUD rather than helpful to the conversation.
Whaaaat? On a American website, driven by a American VC company, are you sure? That has nothing to do with anything in the conversation...
If someone talks about "Most countries" they're not actually talking about some percentage of countries in the world generally, they're specifically talking about "most countries I know about", so when people start being fuzzy about those sort of details, it'd help all of us (not the ones from specific countries) actually understand what's going on and where. For all we know, they could be talking about India, especially since I've already added non-US context with my previous comment they themselves responded to...
in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country. you could do it by prefix if you wanted to still use the list mechanically, maybe? But the only reason I see for an opt in list is to allow the marketing companies to still exist
... I don't? I'm just want to know what country ferngodfather is talking about, as I'm sure the experience differs a lot by country, made evident by countless of comments in this submission.
> in either case instead of a do not call list, they should be banned completely from calling any number in the country.
I don't disagree with this, but for people suffering from these daily spam calls today, there might be ways to fix that, in a shorter time-frame than "petition the government, then propose a law, then get the law into agreement, then get the law into effect". If we're being clear about what countries people are talking about, there wouldn't be so much FUD about the subject.
Maybe 5-6 years ago and before that, I used to get a lot of sales and telemarketing phone calls though, both from foreign and local landline and mobile phone numbers. Once I was on the list, and started just saying the name of the list, the calls eventually died down and today, I don't get a single spam call.
Why would a no-call list work well in one country but not others? I don't get it. At least explain what makes them work in Spain or Sweden if you are convinced they are the reason you don't get calls?
I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU. But even the GDPR doesn't stop scammers, and neither does any no-call list. Not in any country.
We're all on the "please don't rob me" list and robberies are still a thing.
My parent (or parent-parent) comment made this clear, why a list in one country might work but in others not:
> I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too.
If there is no law about it, and no enforcement, then obviously such list would work less effectively than in countries where it is supported by a law somehow, and it is enforced.
> I think what you have noticed is that the GDPR made it harder for legitimate companies to cold-call all over the EU
It has not, why would GDPR have an effect on the telemarketing companies, especially trans-EU ones? They're properly registered as controllers (otherwise they'd be shut down), and added more controls around the data they store. GDPR doesn't outlaw storing data, just controls how companies do so.
The GDPR has fines up to 4% of the company's turnover if they contact people without consent or prior business reasons. If that doesn't work, then a "please don't call me" list where there are basically no consequences sure as hell won't.
Maybe he's in France, since this article is about France having to ban all telemarketing calls since the block lists apparently don't work.
Don't let your regional indignation get in the way of doing basic logic.
How on earth am I supposed to assume they live in France, just because that's in the submission article? Conversations in the comments regularly go beyond the scope of the article, and even the commentator themselves said "Most countries" so clearly they're talking about more than just one.
How do you know that a call that never reaches you was stopped by the no-call list as opposed to your number not being on the list of numbers to call today?
The way the companies manage the lists, is basically that they have three types, they have huge unranked/unchecked lists of just numbers, one list of "good" numbers that are at least online, not on do-not-call lists, haven't recently been sold to already, and so on, then the group of blacklists essentially. Whenever the telemarketers work in their stations, the only numbers that even get dialed by the central robot for them, are the "good" numbers they've been assigned for their shift.
DND is available both on Android and iOS.
So unless the phone company starts banning phone companies that don't enforce correct caller id, it won't do anything.
But it evidently does do something, since now it's confirmed in these threads that at least 4 (possibly) more countries do have these lists, and they do work.
Speak with your local politicians to fix the issues that bothers you. They don't listen, out on the streets and protest. Same way civilians communicate with their governments in every other democracy :)
Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.
Everybody seems to pretend to be black Americans, whose freedoms weren't gained simply by protest, but by being beaten and having dogs sicced on them while protesting before cameras, and the shame that white people felt while watching that on television - and the pressure of "whataboutism" coming from the Russians that the USA was being judgemental about freedom while also being an apartheid state.
Other people have aped the black civil rights struggle (deemed the "civil rights" struggle), and it has amounted to middle class people walking in the streets, congratulating each other and socializing. I don't know of any accomplishments resulting from that.
Street protests were traditionally a show of force; an indication that an overwhelming number of people were on the edge of violence. They often ended in a lynching, or the burning down of a building. Black people did not have that option, so they just offered their bodies to television cameras - this was not traditional, this was new. The only model they had before that was Gandhi, and that was not a traditional Indian thing as many think, but an idea he took from Tolstoy.
Time to crack open a history book and find out why Baltimore was called Mobtown.
Walking in the street has never done anything.
Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
> You might still be young
I'm almost 40.
Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
With that comes that protests can be successful, and the trick is to figure out why the protests you've gone to haven't been successful then, as they probably could have been, and then try to change it.
It's you, and many other people, but unless you all get together and do something, there will never be enough pressure for things to actually escalate. You cannot "stop then escalate", you put pressure until it escalates by itself. But the pressure thing is something that people need to actively participate in of course.
I don't really care about historical protests tbh, that's the past. They may have been effective at the time but that's a different context, with different values and virtues
We have to operate in today's environment which is one where protest is just viewed as a part of daily life, an annoyance to be tuned out, like walking past a homeless person on the sidewalk
These folks get it done, and embarrass us as a society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Protests_in_South_Kor...
Especially the most recent strike.
And yes, some countries still seem to have effective protests. I just don't have a lot of confidence in the power of protest to overcome the power of lobbyists
Be like the Koreans.
Google AI overview for Canada population breakdown: Canada is not homogeneous; it is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Nearly one-quarter of people living in Canada were born outside the country.
Diversity is in fact not our strength. It keeps us fighting amongst ourselves while the lobbyists push government to do whatever they want
Not a very popular opinion, and probably going to earn me some ire, but oh well
They can also legally bypass "no soliciting" signs at people's homes.
But requires grassroots organizing. Best day to start was yesterday, second-best day to start is today :)
The last few weeks it's been spammy text messages from politicians, though.
I am not sure why it works so well here. I have vague recollections of news articles about it being ignored in the past. I guess they just struck down hard on those. Also, I imagine if you put yourself on that list you would be really grumpy if someone called to try to sell you something.
I'm guessing (since Norway and Sweden tends to be more similar than different) that Norway also have something similar to the Swedish "Marknadsföringslagen" ("The Marketing Act") that effectively outlaws companies from calling people who obviously don't want to be called. They quite literally get fines if they call people on these lists, hence the companies actively cross-reference against them.
I've worked in cold-calling telemarketing in both Sweden and Spain in my previous life, both companies I worked for were deadly afraid of accidentally calling people on these lists, and actively instructed employees to basically say "Sorry", hang up and flag the number if someone mentioned the name of the lists.
So it worked for a time, legit companies stoped calling; however most people didn't knew about Bloctel as it was little advertised.
Meanwhile, spam calls turned into scam calls, and a real issue especially with the elderly.
So I think that banning all unsolicited calling kills two birds with one stone, spam becomes illegal and scams as a consequence becomes easier to spot as there are no more unsolicited calls.
And perhaps also (unironically) more persuadable due to the rampant commercialism and historic openness (to ideas, strangers, everything) of their society.
It only takes one example of someone on the list getting scam calls to prove they don't work. And also, no matter how many on the list are not getting calls it doesn't prove it was because of the list.
I will never, ever, work with Freshworks, Freshdesk, Freshservice, or any of their other products as a direct result of this.
Most of the people doing cold-calling been trained to listen for the names of the lists, and have strict orders what to do with the number in case someone they call brings it up.
Also, it depends on the company keeping their word that they won't call you when you are on this list.
Nobody needs or wants these calls, they are always some company wanting to upsell you something you don't really need, they shouldn't be opt-out.
Years ago when I first found Lista Robinson was because I felt like I received calls once a day and had to do something about it because it was too much. If I got 3-6 calls per day I'd think I'd get rid of my phone in total, I wouldn't want to have a phone at all if that happened :P Then some of the residents in the US are used to gunshots going off in their neighborhood, I just don't know what to think anymore...
There are tax benefits to having the company foot the phone bill, but it's not worth it, currently.
I'm not sure how enforcement works, from the copy on their website it seems like it's purely voluntary to even check there, but serious companies do because their customers will hate them forever if they call people who are registered.
I'm actually surprised it works so well given the apparent lack of enforcement. The only calls I ever get these days are from someone with an Indian accent who says "hello I'm calling from Blockchain", and even that has been a while!
Now it was decades ago I worked in cold calling telemarketing, but back then, the company basically purchased/subscribed to various lists of numbers they get from other companies, and also had lists of numbers to not call, either obtained from the do-not-call registries, or their own lists of "unsellable" customers, bad numbers and so on, simply crossed-references the ones that they for legal (or otherwise) shouldn't call, then the telemarketers who all sit in basically automated stations, end up just calling the "good" numbers. Different teams get different chunks of the numbers, but all the calls they're supposed to be doing, are supposed to not be on any of the do-not-call lists already.
The telemarketers themselves are told to basically hang up and mark the number as "do not call" if anyone picks up and says/mentions the name of lists. Most companies I knew from then took the lists seriously since their mechanism is based on actual laws in the countries, and evidently since I nor the people I enrolled in these lists receive marketing calls, the companies today takes them equally seriously.
Apparently that name is used in germany, netherlands, Belgium and more. It stems from Robinson Crusoe, which of course makes sense, as he was disconnected from the world :)
Personal take: it has no real effect, as especially foreign spam/scam callers have no insight or interest in looking up the list. Any ban is welcome!
Hah, I was similarly surprised, especially since in Sweden where I come from, it's called the "NIX-registry" for no rhyme or reason. At least Robinson makes sense to me :)
[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html
Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
And there's a lot of telemarketing and scams happening across country lines.
I mean, they should still do it. It's just the first problem they'd face.
Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).
STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.
Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.
The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".
Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.
But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.
There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.
There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .
they can continue to send me junk mail and unsolicited texts which already gets filed correctly
friends and family only
_they_ call _me_ with ideas on how to get me to pay them; when i go in, my vitals are strong
But then I remembered that most people here are Americans, and you (if you're American, I'm assuming here) don't go to the hospital/doctor just because, as it costs so much, compared to the life I'm used to, where whenever there is a health worry, you go to the doctor/hospital and they say "don't worry, it's fine" most of the time.
My doctors can communicate asynchronously through the MyChart app/website (the app is fairly terrible, I would rather them just use email, but oh well) where I can read and respond when it makes sense for me. Any test that they are running where the results could be bad is already asynchronous (or I am in the hospital) so delaying a few hours in reading it doesn't seem like a big deal even if it is something bad.
Email can be unreliable and slow.
If the threat of an 999999 $£€ fine per call isn't enough.
I opted in to a block list and after a few months received much less calls, but still more than zero. I think that now that everyone is on the block list by default companies will have to be more careful and it will be easier to report any issue.
(Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.)
[1] https://www.nixtelefon.org/
[2] https://nixa.nixadresserat.se/
I believe iOS has a feature to force unknown numbers to declare themselves before connecting, which is less good but still a thing.
All it helps is filling in the scammers' pockets without being taxed for it. Also, they do cooperate with Indian authorities:
* https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-busts-gurugram-ca...
* https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/fbi-tip-lea...
Canada has a national do-not-call list and that hasn't stopped me from getting hit multiple times a week by startup sales reps.
I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.
They do this to themselves if they don't leave a voicemail or can't bother to send a text. 99.9% of the scammers and spammers never do, so it's a good filter.
For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account.
If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.
its also prone to mistakes which is another process that needs to be managed etc.
from a consumer standpoint this sounds super good ofc tho.
i will post my phone nr everywhere :)
Eventually the obvious spam callers would all quit and the volume would reduce to a handful of borderline cases. So the spam department wouldn't make a lot of money anymore, but the volume would be so low it would barely register.
They can't get the money from the spammers, if they could this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
I don't see a downside yet.
What peer networks? Vodaphone, AT&T or whatever the largest operator in India is? You're going to cut off India because someone there calls people claiming to be Microsoft selling antivirus protection? Refuse calls from AT&T?
Nah man, you're not. Also not from a customer that ordered 100 numbers last month and is defunct this month, leaving you with 100 000 confirmed spam calls to pay for.
If it was possible to simply charge the spammers money, this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
In Norway there is a list [1] run by the state registry service (Brønnøysundregitrene). Any individual can add their phone number to the list.
Anyone cold calling is required to check that list at least once a month and there are fines for calling someone on the list.
[1] https://www.brreg.no/om-oss/registrene-vare/om-reservasjonsr...
Of course it would be abused, but a properly verified caller id system for all the big ones; the inland revenue, the major banks, would mitigate 9/10 scam calls I get each day.
There's absolutely a real, qualitative difference between contact from a real human being who respects everyone's time and has done actual research, and someone who is just playing the numbers game and blasting as many people as they can (regardless of how "warm" the leads are).
It's a bit of a spectrum, but if someone has taken the time to handwrite and research an email or call, I'll at least try to give them the courtesy of a response.