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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

#111

Post by ssharp »

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…

I worked in a call center the summer in between high school and college, and the company I worked at was very cognizant of the various laws. This was before the federal no-call list was enacted, but I'm positive they strive for compliance with that as well. If people asked to be taken off the calling list, we had to flag their call as such and if we were caught not doing that, we'd get in trouble. Their were nuances to it though. You had to specifically ask to be taken off the list in order to be scrubbed entirely. If you said "no thank you" and hung up, you were getting called in 24-48 hours without a doubt. If you gave two "no's", you were scrubbed from the campaign, but not the global list.

It was still a terrible and shitty job, but it paid a few bucks better than minimum wage and the company was fairly lax on attendance (I was 17, so I had different priorities and a general lack of responsibility).

The worst day of my two or three months at that job was when I got put on a calling campaign for some mega-church. I felt terrible asking people who probably didn't have the money to donate to give up their money to this organization that was clearly raking in tens of millions a year and whose leader/minister/whatever was a multi-millionaire. Thankfully, I only had to do that one day and had so much motivation not to take in a single dollar, that I failed to land a single donation and was moved the next day to trying to get people to do balance transfers on their credit cards. Still annoying, but at least I didn't feel like I was robbing people by appealing to their faith and handing their money over to some evil creep.

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

#112

Post by jsprinkles »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #88
michaelrkn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about robocalls, but we primarily deal in live phone calls, dialed by a computer but connected to a live person ("predictive dialing" or "power dialing"). These calls are almost always legal for political campaigns.

Does that smell like manipulation of the statute to benefit the politicians at the expense of the voters to everyone else or just me? If the populus don't want unsolicited calls when did the politicians decide that they should over rule them and what's the protection against this sort of action happening in more serious situations?

> Does that smell like manipulation of the statute

That's called business.

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

#113

Post by glimcat »

rawwebdesign84 wrote: post #109
biot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one area which would be good for the government to get into. They have the resources to actually follow up and do something about it. Create a number of fake residential numbers, publish them in the phone book, add them to the do not call list, publish them on websites, and so on. Then watch for the calls to come in. They could do the fake credit card thing and prosecute the offenders to hell and back. It'd b…

Business Idea: Instead of the government doing this (and being self-funded), why not do it commercially? Just set up thousands of personal phone numbers (honeypots) and just wait for the calls to roll in. Naturally issues like tracking down the callers and filing mass lawsuits would generate problems the startup would have to overcome, but you'd be at an advantage because you'd have plenty of data at your disposal. E…

Can I register my business phone number or a fax number?

The National Do Not Call Registry is only for personal phone numbers. Business-to-business calls and faxes are not covered by the National Do Not Call Registry.

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

#115

Post by cowkingdeluxe »

septerr wrote: post #106

I don't know, the part about faking interest in order to get their contact info seems kind of like stooping down to their level. I don't think I could bring myself to do that. I might get on their do not call list and tell them straightforward that I am thinking of suing them if they don't stop calling me.

The whole point of faking interest was to figure out who they were, so he could sue them for the first violation and any other violation that occurred after placement on the DNC list.

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

#117

Post by readme »

readme wrote: post #116

What OP did sounds like entrapment to me. There's no way of knowing whether they would have continued to call him had he not egged them on, yet he can still sue for each count. I think that's unfair.

Downvote? Nice. I guess HNers don't realize that stealing from criminals is no more honorable than stealing from anyone else.

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

#118

Post by prawn »

cowkingdeluxe wrote: post #115
septerr wrote: post #106

I don't know, the part about faking interest in order to get their contact info seems kind of like stooping down to their level. I don't think I could bring myself to do that. I might get on their do not call list and tell them straightforward that I am thinking of suing them if they don't stop calling me.

The whole point of faking interest was to figure out who they were, so he could sue them for the first violation and any other violation that occurred after placement on the DNC list.

And if it went any way towards discouraging even one company from robodialling random numbers, I'm all for it.

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

#119

Post by Zakharov »

glimcat wrote: post #113
rawwebdesign84 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business Idea: Instead of the government doing this (and being self-funded), why not do it commercially? Just set up thousands of personal phone numbers (honeypots) and just wait for the calls to roll in. Naturally issues like tracking down the callers and filing mass lawsuits would generate problems the startup would have to overcome, but you'd be at an advantage because you'd have plenty of data at your disposal. E…

Can I register my business phone number or a fax number? The National Do Not Call Registry is only for personal phone numbers. Business-to-business calls and faxes are not covered by the National Do Not Call Registry.

You could try a more complicated approach: sell consumers a device which records their calls locally, and sign them up to the do-not-call list. The device would have a spam button; when pressed it would send the caller id + recording of call to your company's servers. The company would use this to help the customer threaten or sue telemarketers, splitting settlement/lawsuit revenue.

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

#120

Post by MBCook »

tlrobinson wrote: post #35
eslachance wrote: post #6

(Edit: please ignore the following line, I misread. Kept for posterity.) The title is incorrect. He threatened to sue but didn't actually do it. Which I'm all for. (/Edit) I received, just yesterday, a call from a company claiming they could reduce my credit card interest rate to "up to 0%", but it was obviously a scam as he said he worked both for Visa and Mastercard, claiming it was "the same company and they both…

I got a call that went something like this: Them: hi I'm blahblah and I'm calling about your credit card Me: is this about one of my existing cards? Them: yes Me: which one? Them: all of them Me: click

I had that problem constantly with the auto warranty calls that were so common a few years ago (until the FTC or FCC finally got them).

They couldn't tell me which of my cars the warranty was up on, and would get nervous and hang up.

Of course, since I don't technically own a car, it was a trick question any way.

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