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France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

lemonde.fr

371–380 of 527 posts

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they could just block calls from Morocco and cut off much of the problem.

"Just block calls between France and Marocco" is a very racist proposal FYI there is at least 900k+ people in France either immigrant from Marocco or with an origin and a 100k+ people with french nationality or origin living in Marocco

That's not racist it's simply a practical solution to spam calls coming from Morocco.

It's completely irrelevant how many immigrants there are, they live in France now they can just dial out to Morocco and we ban inbound calls from Morocco.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#372
So many of the calls I get (in the US) have no mention of a company name and if you ask they hang up immediately AND they come from fake numbers so blocking or reporting is meaningless. Is the situation in France different? I don't think this would really do much for the situation in the US sadly unless we got reliable non spoofable caller ID.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#373
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#374
post #283

This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do. I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy. Most of the world has solved the worst of…

I live in the U.S., have a U.S. phone number, and get maybe one spam call every six months. (Spam texts about once a month, with the exception of before elections, when it’s more.) I wonder what causes the difference. Do I have a newer phone number that isn’t on as many lists? Or is my carrier filtering calls before they get to my phone? I briefly activated a second SIM on an MVNO that gave me a new number, and that…

if you ever used your number to sign up for something online, then you'll likely eventually get tons of spam calls

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries have these no call lists but they are fairly useless as there is no enforcement. I've even heard stories of some scammers exclusively using such lists, as they are pre-verified!

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. DND is available both on Android and iOS.

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#376
The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them.

Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.

Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.

This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.

The same should exist for emails.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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…

Never done anything directly. But large-scale protests can move the Overton window.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#378
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#379
post #11

Great idea! 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…

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 h…

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#380

The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them. Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent. Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option. This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky…

impressively convoluted. Spam calls are coming from all over the world using voip and prepaid sims. There aren't any accounts to "bill". Not to mention a whole new arena for fraud in spoofing regular numbers for micropayments
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