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I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

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

#81
post #31

Main culprits in this nonsense are the phone companies who profit off it at their customers' expense. It's basically like cable tv where you're expected to pay to watch commercials.

So you want the Phone Companies to get involved in policing the content of the calls that are made? When you order a phone line, should the Phone Company put you through a detailed and exhaustive screening process mandated by their lawyers because they've been sued for the contents of calls that some of their customers have made? Should they then be allowed to monitor your calls for violations of their AUP? I mean, i…

With email, I get to decide if I want to read it or not. With the phone I don't get to decide if I want to let it ring or not.

The real issue is that phones were ever allowed to ring in the first place. They should all just leave a message which should then be stored until a I chose to listen to it. Then in the future, calls from that number could be allowed.

In addition the phone company could allow you to preunblock certain numbers, such as those from your schools and hospitals.

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

#82
post #45
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That's the entire point of sanitising your lists. When someone asks you to stop calling them you remove their number and stop calling them.

You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices. Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first. Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if aske…

Didn't he state his preference was for him to call the salesman back and the salesman insisted he be the one to call?

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

#83
post #82
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices. Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first. Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if aske…

Didn't he state his preference was for him to call the salesman back and the salesman insisted he be the one to call?

That's semantics about what happens, doesn't change the overall situation. Reword to "the salesman said he would call back and the customer didn't ask him not to but instead said it was fine".

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

#84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

violent: acting with or characterized by uncontrolled, strong, rough force

violence: an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws

I would say some would label stealing a car as a violent action. But of course different people's definition will vary.

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

#85

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…

Thanks to Voice over IP, this is pretty much impossible to regulate any more. The telephone networks were built on a trust model that VoIP destroyed. Now, you can originate a call on the internet that's nearly impossible to trace.

>you can originate a call on the internet that's nearly impossible to trace. //

Why do the phone networks route calls with faked originator numbers. I can see why they don't block genuine numbers (that terminate at an actual phone) -- to get you to pay for blocking. But surely they can tell that an incoming call from a foreign call centre with a local number is fake.

Recently I've had calls, in the UK, from numbers where the [given] originating number doesn't exist. Why any phone company would route these is beyond me. (They're faked because we're signed up to do-not-call lists and they don't want to be sued). More to the point is why the regulators (OFCOM) let the phone companies get away with routing such calls.

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

#86
post #45
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That's the entire point of sanitising your lists. When someone asks you to stop calling them you remove their number and stop calling them.

You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices. Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first. Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if aske…

The software that telemarketers use should make this automatic. You have a list of calls to make, during a call you can hit DNC which removes them from your any everyone else's queue. There's another button to add a call back at a future date. If the customer is on the DNC list it won't show up as a callback or will at least very clearly show that you shouldn't call them.

http://www.five9.com/call-center-software/features/do-not-ca...

> Five9 helps you comply with this legislation by letting you upload your company's supplemental Do Not Call list, which prevents these numbers from being dialed by your outbound and autodialer campaigns, and even manual calls placed by agents. In addition, you can automatically track requests for Do Not Call from inbound return calls, and enable agents to fulfill callers' requests to be placed on the Do Not Call list in real-time.

It's easy stuff if you're trying to be legit. There are a lot of companies that don't make that effort.

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

#87
post #86
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices. Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first. Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if aske…

The software that telemarketers use should make this automatic. You have a list of calls to make, during a call you can hit DNC which removes them from your any everyone else's queue. There's another button to add a call back at a future date. If the customer is on the DNC list it won't show up as a callback or will at least very clearly show that you shouldn't call them. http://www.five9.com/call-center-software/fea…

But once you get past cold calling and into actual back and forth, the conversations don't go through telesales lists or software. At that point you're no longer doing telesales, you're discussing options with a client, albeit a client who hss yet to make their first purchase.

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

#88
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political robocall campaigns are absolutely NOT exempt in every state. It's kind of odd that you'd make the initial post about how people need to do robocalls right and then you make a blanket statement how political campaigns are exempt.

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?

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

#90
post #8

> Although manually dialing is very rare, many of these regulations do not apply to manually dialing. Followed by > I already had three violations on my hand, but I knew I could get two more pretty easily. The next day, I called the alarm company and asked to be put on their internal Do Not Call list, and asked for a copy of their Do Not Call policy. A few days later, David called me again – violation number four. So…

I too felt that he gamed it to his advantage and if we want to filter it through an ethical lens, it might not pass.

But then, I started to think about what is the whole point of his exercise? If it was to make money out of this, then it comes off as sleazy. I would like to believe his idea was to actually "give it to them" rather than make money out of them (at least to begin with).

Anyway, I think what matters to me is, if this is THE ONLY WAY to ensure I can both get out of their pesky calls as well as rub it to them by taking some money out of them, I might do it too. End of the day, I feel there has to be an end to the kind of crap telemarketers do and if this is one way to weed them out, so be it.

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