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I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

impactdialing.com

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Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#71

Post by dangrossman »

_sentient wrote: post #7

It would be nice if the author had laid out some examples of how telemarketing can be done correctly, without breaking any laws and risking this sort of response. Hopefully we will see a followup post that explains how Impact Dialing gets away with it, but I suspect that they benefit from all the fear and uncertainty.

It's pretty simple. For calling residential numbers for marketing purposes:

1) Subscribe to the federal and state Do-Not-Call lists for each state you're going to call people in. Don't call anyone on those lists unless you have a business relationship with them. It's legal for Comcast to call you to upsell you to a better package if you're a Comcast customer, even if you're on the federal DNC list.

2) Keep a copy of your Do-Not-Call policy on file to provide to callers if they ask for it.

3) If a caller asks to be put on your Do-Not-Call list, do so and don't call them again.

4) Don't spoof your caller ID as anything but your business or the business you're calling on behalf of.

I could've easily missed something, but that's the gist of what I got from reading the federal telemarketing acts. There's also lots of technical details on performance thresholds for predictive dialers and such, so that you don't get too many of those calls where you pick up and nobody is on the other end as the autodialer was too aggressive.

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#72

Post by mitchty »

lps41 wrote: post #63
michaelrkn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Corin. I asked to be on their internal DNC list, and several days later, they called me again. That's illegal. Don't you think companies should have to respect your requests to be put on their DNC lists? I mean, if you unsubscribed from an email list and kept getting emails, wouldn't you be upset?

My understanding of the law is that if they have established a business relationship with you (you express interest in their product), that "relationship" lasts for (I believe) 30 days, during which they can call you freely. Asking to be put on their DNC list should cut off your relationship, but I think had they gone to court they would have had a solid defense that you expressed interest in their product, and you w…

Doesn't that assume that he wanted the relationship in the first place? He tried getting on their do not call list originally. By my count that makes any further relationships null and void as one party was acting in poor faith (IANAL no idea what the legal term might be).

Basically the fact that they called him without reason and avoided providing their actual contact information would seem to make a judge question the relationship they might have.

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#73

Post by michaelrkn »

hermannj314 wrote: post #38
corin_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was in the middle of legitimate conversations with you. You have a product yourself, if I contacted you and implied I was interested in becoming a customer, and we got to talking about it over the phone, would you look up your DNC list every single time before calling me just in case I had, since we last spoke, contacted a colleague of yours to be put on it?

In his post he links to the Code of Federal Regulations. It allows for mistakes to be made by the business. This is what I read: It says: you can't call someone that says "Don't call me" However, if you have a written policy to try your best and follow the law and generally your business follows the policy, then you are not liable for violating this rule if it was a simple mistake. So the case of David calling him ba…

I couldn't have said it better. I believe this business was not trying to follow the law, so I sued them for everything I could. I mentioned in another reply that there was another company who called me illegally, and I found out that they fired the person who set up the calls I got. I didn't sue them.

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#74

Post by michaelrkn »

wlesieutre wrote: post #62
randomfool wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current caller ID system is incredibly broken- I'm getting 3 calls a day to my personal cell phone from the same scammers and have not been able to get their real contact info. After watching all these TV shows with the 'hang up within 10secs or you'll be traced!' I expected AT&T to be able to help me out. No dice. Unfortunately the phone #'s are always random and AT&T just wants to sell me a service that allows…

If you don't mind throwing more of your data to Google, you can port your number to google voice and block as many numbers as you like. It even has spam filtering for calls.

I have my business line on GV and it filters out hundreds of spam calls.

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#75

Post by michaelrkn »

dangrossman wrote: post #71
_sentient wrote: post #7

It would be nice if the author had laid out some examples of how telemarketing can be done correctly, without breaking any laws and risking this sort of response. Hopefully we will see a followup post that explains how Impact Dialing gets away with it, but I suspect that they benefit from all the fear and uncertainty.

It's pretty simple. For calling residential numbers for marketing purposes: 1) Subscribe to the federal and state Do-Not-Call lists for each state you're going to call people in. Don't call anyone on those lists unless you have a business relationship with them. It's legal for Comcast to call you to upsell you to a better package if you're a Comcast customer, even if you're on the federal DNC list. 2) Keep a copy of…

Very well put.

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#76

Post by michaelrkn »

alain94040 wrote: post #11

Great, but the main problem is to find out who is calling you. I wish the phone company had some kind of obligation to give me that information, so I could trace back annoying telemarketing calls. Stringing them along until they reveal who they work for just doesn't work well. Another idea would be for banks to offer special credit card numbers, that get automatically flagged as bogus purchases. Any bank offering suc…

I like the credit card idea.

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#77

Post by maxerickson »

yashchandra wrote: post #46
jay_m wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have this same problem. I'd get called twice a day by the same company, and if I picked up, they would just hang up the phone. Eventually I got tired of this so when I picked up one of their calls, I opened with "Hi, PizzaPizza here, may I take your order please?" After that they never called again.

nice. I will try that next time :)

Do you answer twice a day?

(I would think even scammers stop wasting time on people that are not likely customers)

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#78

Post by tomjen3 »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #70
tomjen3 wrote: post #66

The solution to this is to put these people in prison. Phone harassment (and telemarketing is harrasement) is theft of attention and that ought to be as illegal as any other kind of theft.

Prison should be for violent crimes. This kind of thing should be settled in civil court - as it is.

If I take your car, do you sue me or call the cops?

Re: I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

#79

Post by joelhaasnoot »

Killswitch wrote: post #9

I like this article. I worked in telemarketing for a while, and was probably one of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Not only did the companies not give a crap about the laws, they didn't care about their supposed customers. We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued them into using it over much better and more established companies. Example: AAA tow services. I found myself trying to be the good guy in the situation an…

My girlfriend dropped out of school and ended up at a call center cold calling Chamber of Commerce-listed companies/sole-proprietors selling energy (after being told she'd be calling people about hotel vouchers). She quit after three weeks. The script they were supposed to keep to had bogus lines about tax writeoffs you could get (which would be illegal) and most people weren't at all interested.
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