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France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

lemonde.fr

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Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to ban telemarketing, you just need to make void and nulls contracts made by phone. Do so, and 99% of telemarketers no longer have the incentive to call anybody.

Walk me through an example here. I'm a telemarketer who calls you up, sells you on something, and charges your card. What changes in that scenario?

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#432

Until this law is ever applied, I warmly recommend my fellow french to install the «saracroche» app to filter out unsollicited calls. It’s free, open source, all my family uses it for about 2 months now and it just works. Btw, if it’s creator read this : thanks A LOT ! :) https://saracroche.org/fr/

+1 Great app, had no spam calls going through since installing it.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#433
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#434

Kudos to France. But the problem isn't telemarketing calls. It's the wholesale grab-fest of phone numbers from every.damn.nook.and.crany of the US soil. Hospitals, Car dealers, dentists, vets, brokerages, title offices... literally EVERY one of them is leaking YOUR information to everyone in the world. within a week of closing a deal on my house i get a scam paper mail that almost looked legit asking me to pay $100 t…

Great tip I saw once - whenever you have to register through a form, use First Name + the name of the company / service you are leaving your data to. Once you start receiving spammy emails / text messages calling you by your « name », you know who you have to thank for leaking your data

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#435

Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop. Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally. You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.

"It's useless to make laws, bad guys will ignore them".

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#437

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

To end up on your phone, VOIP have to terminate somewhere in local phone network. These networks need to stop accepting calls from shady places, or every call like this that they cannot charge back to original (or intermediary network) becomes a loss to them. And telecom companies do not like losses...

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#438

Until this law is ever applied, I warmly recommend my fellow french to install the «saracroche» app to filter out unsollicited calls. It’s free, open source, all my family uses it for about 2 months now and it just works. Btw, if it’s creator read this : thanks A LOT ! :) https://saracroche.org/fr/

Was a recent convert. It's so much better than the competing apps, it's almost funny. It whips Google's antispam for example. And it's free software.

Though to be fair it is helped by the fact that businesses have mandatory phone prefixes to use when doing telemarketing in France.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Be like the Koreans.

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.…

I also think this is a major factor.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#440

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…

There a story, perhaps apochraphal, from 15 years ago of a man setting up a premium rate line and getting paid whenever telemarketers called him. I believe the phone service said anyone doing that would be fined because you need to inform potential callers it's a premium rate number
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