I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

http://www.impactdialing.com/2012/05/how-to-sue-a-telemarketer/

by michaelrkn • 14 years ago

346 145 14 years ago

impactdialing.com

markstahler• 14 years ago

Well done. Now I want to explore Canadian law on the matter.

dos_equis• 14 years ago

Keep us posted!

latch2• 14 years ago

The first call after he goes on the DNC is clearly a violation.

The calls thereafter, when he's stringing them along...not so sure. Once you start saying "I'm interested, tell me more"...I think the company has a fairly solid claim of having a business relationship...if not legally, certainly ethically.

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

That's why I didn't sue for any of the calls after I talked to a rep - only the automated calls, and the call that came after I asked to be on the DNC list.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

What about the very first call? That's certainly a violation as well.

latch2• 14 years ago

I agree that 1 or more calls were improper. And threatening to sue for that and getting money is fine. Maybe it doesn't matter that the last X calls weren't if the first Y calls were...still seemed worth pointing it out.

ianferrel• 14 years ago

In my opinion, the fact that there's no way to figure out who is calling you and hold them accountable without stringing them along makes this an ethical thing to do.

rdtsc4• 14 years ago

Yeah I think it sort of puts it in the hands of the judge at that point (I am talking about a small claims court).

I would be interesting to find out what would have happened in court.

Even with the most business-sympathetic judge, he should at least allow for the first couple of calls to be admitted as violations because in those cases he clearly did not have any semblance of a business relationship with them.

The most consumer-sympathetic judge would allow all calls to be counted against the company as the person did explicitly ask to be put on the DNL. He expresses an initial interest but then decided he didn't want anything to do with the company.

bbrtyth• 14 years ago

I read there were some calls inbetween that he didn't count. After that, he asked to be put on their Do Not Call list, and they still called a few more times. So violations for the first few and the last few.

yashchandra4• 14 years ago

Great. I am getting calls from one company every day twice. I called them and asked them to stop calling. They said sure done. But the calls have not stopped. I am inspired by your post.

jay_m• 14 years ago

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.

yashchandra4• 14 years ago

nice. I will try that next time :)

eslachance2• 14 years ago

(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 use the same Reduce Interest Rate department". I unfortunately lost my nerve a little and called him out, after which he became much more familiar, aggressive and even insulting. Don't have anything beyond a phone number and a name (which is probably fake). Wish I could find the nerve to do this myself.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

He most certainly sued:

> I wrote back giving them the dates and caller IDs of the calls, and when I didn’t hear back in a week, I filed my suit.

He just settled out of court before appearing in front of a judge.

> Wish I could find the nerve to do this myself.

Why don't you? What do you have to lose, aside the time trying to track them down?

eslachance2• 14 years ago

Oh I misread that as "I threated to sue if I didn't hear back in a week". Oops, sorry, my bad.

As for trying it myself, I guess it's simply because whenever I get into such a situation, I lose my nerve, butterflies invade my stomach, and I can't think straight. Just calling Visa to try to report it gave me the same kind of jitters, I really hate it.

I will, however, report the information I have in my possession to my local police department. That way perhaps I'll lead them to something, if I'm lucky. Nervous or not, I can try to do my part.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

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

MBCook• 14 years ago

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.

_sentient• 14 years ago

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.

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

Hi Sentient. We actually mainly work with political campaigns, which are exempt from the regulations. I don't think we benefit from the uncertainty; it makes it difficult to explain to potential customers what is and isn't legal, and we turn away clients sometimes because they aren't familiar enough with the laws to know what's legal and what's not.

thesis2• 14 years ago

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.

lrs• 14 years ago

What sorts of policies and practices, if any, do you have in place to prevent your company or clients from engaging in the kind of behavior that you yourself found so personally objectionable that you sued for it?

dangrossman• 14 years ago

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.

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

Very well put.

corin_10• 14 years ago

> 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 he manually dialed, because of previous conversations indicating a genuine interest in the product(s). And that's a violation? Suddenly all interest in and respect for the author just went down the drain as far as I'm concerned.

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

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?

corin_10• 14 years ago

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?

thesis2• 14 years ago

I unsubscribe from email occasionally, and every once in a while it'll say something along the lines of: "You will be opt'd out of our list within 1-2 weeks."

When I receive another email I just delete it. I'd rather go on with my day and do productive things then getting all bent of of shape about it.

BUT! I agree some telephone marketing campaigns can be down right harassing. But 4 calls over 2 months? I would have just sent them to voicemail and deleted them without listening. To each his own, I suppose.

TwiztidK• 14 years ago

It's not the same as a mailing list at all. It was person-to-person contact between David and yourself. Although it appears that the law was violated when you were called by David, he was simply following up on your interest in his company's products.

Honestly, I feel like you are totally abusing the law in this situation. At the first available opportunity, you should've asked to be placed on their DNC list without expressing false interest in their products. Then you would've been in the right by sueing for the first an all subsequent calls. It seems that you went about this in the most malicious way possible, even going so far as to essentially trick them into violating the law.

lps41• 14 years ago

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 would have likely won nothing.

yaix• 14 years ago

I think you just totally missed the point.

corin_10• 14 years ago

Either explain how/why, or just leave a downvote rather than a comment that says nothing.

Monotoko• 14 years ago

I don't understand why people are voting this guy down. That certainly wasn't a violation, ethically at least. You told him to call you back!

corin_10• 14 years ago

In general, comments with negative scores will get at least a few upvotes, and comments with high scores will get at least a few downvotes, so when a comment is young it's easy to see it voted the opposite direction it will end up on once more people have seen it.

So thanks for the concern, but plenty of the oh-so-valuable karma points heading my way by now, just a couple of people who disagreed right at the start!

Urgh, I hate Karma on HN. I'd much prefer to see other people's comment scores than not see them. And I'd much prefer not to see my own than see them. What irony.

c0mpute3• 14 years ago

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.

Killswitch2• 14 years ago

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 and do my best to actually remove people from the call lists by marking them deceased and that.

But even still the companies would always somehow get those numbers back into circulation hoping that nobody would notice.

Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore.

larrys• 14 years ago

"Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore."

But this also proves something. From what you've written you knew you were doing something that was wrong. As one example:

"We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued (sic) them into using it over much better and more established companies"

But you had to earn a living so you did that. Now I don't know what your particular situation was or how badly you needed the job (proverbial relative dying of cancer or you would be homeless?) but it might be the same premise that the people running the business operate under. Everybody of course draws the line at a different point in terms of the "harm" they are willing to do. They feel that what they do is ok or possibly de-minimis but what someone else is doing on a larger scale (a guy who did what you did for 20 years or owned the business) is "bad".

I'm curious (and not being judgmental that you worked there as we all have different lines) why you kept that job when you saw what they were doing?

jcc80• 14 years ago

It's pretty obvious - he needed to feed & cloth himself. For some, (perhaps you?) there must be some catastrophic event to create day to day money problems. For many people, especially the often young students or mothers who work these jobs, day to day money problems are just a fact of life. Should people plan better so they don't have to compromise and do things they disagree with? Of course, but that isn't everyone's reality.

edit: Or maybe he just wanted money for Spring Break...

Killswitch2• 14 years ago

I was young and like stated, I needed a job and wasn't picky. Not to mention when I started I didn't know what exactly was going on, because I was part of another section that sold the Boston Globe newspaper before moving to the shady side.

I only worked there for 3 months, then I told my boss to go fuck herself and walked out.

Edit: and no offense taken, if you have any questions in regards to what little bit I do know about such a crappy industry let me know. I am somewhat knowledge in it.

Funny enough my current job is at a call center for a GPS company. I don't do any calling though.

joelhaasnoot• 14 years ago

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.

ssharp• 14 years ago

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.

alain940402• 14 years ago

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 such a service? If I ever use the magic number, the transaction is perceived to go through, but it's actually tracked and no money is exchanged. Not sure if it's doable with respect to Visa and Mastercard networks.

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

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.

randomfool• 14 years ago

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 me to block up to 30 phone numbers. But they're calling from more than 30.

pbhjpbhj3• 14 years ago

>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.

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

I like the credit card idea.

biot• 14 years ago

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 be self-funding too.

rawwebdesign84• 14 years ago

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. Eventually you'd learn more about the branch of law that deals with these infractions and how different jurisdictions handle the cases.

What are the ethical side effects?

1. If your business became large enough, and it became a realistic outcome that telemarketers who use illegal tactics would have to pay damages like the 4k one in this article, the ROI for telemarketing may decrease to the point that it's not used any more.

dminor• 14 years ago

> Another idea would be for banks to offer special credit card numbers, that get automatically flagged as bogus purchases. Any bank offering such a service? If I ever use the magic number, the transaction is perceived to go through, but it's actually tracked and no money is exchanged. Not sure if it's doable with respect to Visa and Mastercard networks.

A credit card that allows you to make purchases but never transfers any money? I'm not sure you've quite thought that through.

alain940402• 14 years ago

Actually, why not... My bank knows me. I'm a good customer. 10+ years of banking with them, not one credit card issue. Thousands of dollars on my bank account. When i use this bogus credit card number for $20 to track a spammer, I think my bank could trust me that I'm not just trying to buy something for free.

gelgels• 14 years ago

Some credit cards have "virtual numbers" that you can use for shopping online. You set the limit that can be charged on the numbers and you're notified if someone charges over the limit to the virtual number. (citi credit cards)

reader50002• 14 years ago

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.

crusso• 14 years ago

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, if they're responsible for the content of your calls then they need to be able to monitor them, right?

No, I completely disagree with you. Phone Companies aren't responsible for how their communication channels are abused any more than road builders are responsible for the getaway of bank robbers who use roads.

Cable Companies' are a little different. Mainly because they tend to be the carrier of the content, the creator of the content, and the beneficiary of both. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that in many areas they have a government-enforced monopoly on the biggest data pipe into our homes.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

>So you want the Phone Companies to get involved in policing the content of the calls that are made?

I don't think it's beyond the pale to suggest that phone companies don't allow scammers on their network. Look what happens to ISPs who allow spambots. And there's no policing of content required, merely responding to valid third party reports.

reader50002• 14 years ago

No I was thinking more non-batshit insane measures.

For starters they could let you block calls from unknown numbers.

Indeed, they could require some sort of licensing for numbers/entities originating large volumes of calls.

They could also disallow caller id blocking.

But the reality is abusive telemarketing tactics are a substantial revenue stream for them, so they dont give a shit.

fffggg• 14 years ago

What you suggest is absolutely unnecessary. Merely requiring an identifiable contact is enough to prevent this sort of behavior -- and this was how things were before voip opened things up to untraceable abuse.

The phone company doesn't need to police anything -- they just need to identify the endpoints of a call when a subpoena is issued.

tomjen33• 14 years ago

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.

xxiao• 14 years ago

like this. i was bothered by a caller so much that I had to switch my phone to a new number. yes I'm on the do-not-call list, but the calling company, or more likely some agent it contracts, does not care. the company is named italkBB and i was also getting calls from dish network for months after i ended the contract with them. there is Dell too, after i bought laptop from it i started t o get calls from them, I told them I'm not interested in their calls, but once a while i still get the call, guess it's because i was a customer?

maxerickson3• 14 years ago

If it is a legit call, ask to be put on their courtesy do not call list.

It is fairly non confrontational (especially to the voice on the line) and a very direct signal that you are a dead lead.

goatforce5• 14 years ago

Also, when cancelling a subscription service tell them the reason why you're cancelling is because you're moving overseas.

When I did that in the UK (when I was moving overseas, as it happens) I found that it was a really effective way of bypassing all the usual retention nonsense and, i'd presume, any follow-up calls. If you're moving out of their service area, there's literally nothing they can do to keep you on their service.

pcopley2• 14 years ago

The OP can probably clarify, but I would imagine in the case of Dish network they were allowed to call you because they had a business relationship with you as a prior customer. The same with Dell as once you purchased the laptop they had an existing relationship.

I'm not sure what the precedence is for internal DNC lists v. national DNC registry v. existing business relationships though, so they may still be at some legal fault.

gwillen• 14 years ago

I'd really like to make this work if I could, but I suspect it's impossible in my specific case: all the robocalls I get are scam calls, trying to sell me credit-score services which presumably don't exist. Is it likely that I can get a company name out of them, or that there is even a company to sue?

(And since they are criminals anyway, they have no incentive to settle with me, since even if I win I'd never be able to collect.)

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

There's actually a decent chance it's a real company. I once got a call for insurance that I was sure was a scam, but after playing them along for several calls, I found out it was a legit company. I talked to their CEO, who was very nice, found out their company name, and then explained to him that I could sue him for several thousand dollars. He apologized, said it was an outside firm that they had been working with, and said they had stopped working with that company because of complaints. I didn't sue them.

Estragon• 14 years ago

I really want to go after these stupid bastards who keep calling to offer me a credit card balance transfer. I can't track them down, though. Anyone had any luck with that?

beeskneecaps• 14 years ago

"I believe that, done right, telemarketing is an effective, appreciated way to get people services they want, deliver important political messages, and raise money for non-profits"

This make anyone else cringe?

leephillips2• 14 years ago

Absolutely. There is no "right" way to perpetrate telemarketing. The only difference between this creep and the slime that he sued was that this guy is careful to adhere to the technical minutiae of laws that seem to have been partly written by the telemarketing industry themselves. This was just a sordid story of one antisocial jerk using the courts to extract money from a less savvy antisocial jerk.

I especially like his use of "appreciated". I'm sure I appreciate getting a recorded call telling me whom I should vote for.

corin_10• 14 years ago

I disagree, it depends on the telemarketing, though I do agree that the vast majority is terrible, and that anything using an automated dialer is terrible.

Colleagues of mine in sales sometimes telemarket - in that they will cold call potential customers, but only people they have researched and genuinely think might want to advertise with us, and the track record of a.) people called who end up spending money with us and b.) of those people, the ones who are happy and become repeat customers, does show that in this situation telesales works great for both us and them.

On the other side of good telemarketing, I'm in a position to get plenty of cold calls / cold emails myself, business related, and it's not rare for me to get one that genuinely interests me, and sometimes leads to me spending money with them and getting good results from it. So I don't mind getting those calls/emails.

Outside of business I find them horrific, I've never had a good cold-call to my home landline or my mobile, presumably because for non-business sales it isn't worth doing any research into who I am and whether I'm a valid target.

(But yes, I agree with your judgement in this particular instance.)

michaelrkn13• 14 years ago

Here's an example of what I think is telemarketing done right. We have a client that's a roofing company. They scout areas that have seen a lot of damage from storms, note the houses with roofing damage, and look up their phone numbers. They call the residents, explain how their home insurance companies usually cover most of the cost of the roof repair, and offer to schedule a time to take a closer look at the roof and give an estimate.

I think it's mostly about targeting - don't just call tons of people with no reason, but focus on particular people who have a high likelihood of becoming a customer. Then call them with salespeople who know the industry, be helpful and courteous, and take people off your list who don't want to be called. And, of course, follow the law.

Unfortunately, there's so much bad telemarketing that the good stuff has gotten drowned out, so it's easy to see it all as bad.

leephillips2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, we live in a world where so many people can't tell the difference between right and wrong that I get annoying calls from roofing companies. Here's a clue for you: just because something might not be against the law and might be profitable doesn't mean that it is civil behavior. People like you create the annoyances are the bad side of all our modern, convenient technology. You know very well that those people already know their roofs are damaged and know how to use a telephone to call the roofer that they want to call when it is convenient for them to do so. But you are willing to harass 20 people who don't want to hear from you so that you can hit that one old lady who will swallow your pitch and hire you (or your "client") rather than comparison shop and research reputations.

There is no "good" telemarketing that gets "drowned out." What you are doing is wrong.

drivingmenuts• 14 years ago

I'm going to have to make a note of this to get the telemarketer that keeps calling my cellphone (my only phone) about cruises.

jakejake• 14 years ago

Oh how I would love to do this. Unfortunately a place selling home security seems relatively easy to find who is calling. Not that it actually is easy - in fact it seems it required a good amount of social engineering.

The calls I have gotten are for credit reduction or other dubious services and the impression I get is that their whole operation is shady and secretive - and perhaps not even a legitimate business at all. When one of those wakes me up at 8am on a Sunday I thirst for their blood!

sevenstar• 14 years ago

That was a great read. Not even telemarketers like telemarketers.

eli2• 14 years ago

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but none of this (do not call list, TCPA) applies to a business phone line, correct?

I get constant sleazy robocalls on a business line.

pcopley2• 14 years ago

Correct. Business phone lines (generally) exist to get unsolicited phone calls from people with whom the owner has no existing business relationship.

eli2• 14 years ago

It might be true that business owners are more willing to receive business calls... but I assure you that nobody wants these robocalls for obvious scams.

tnorthcutt• 14 years ago

Please make your company's logo link to your company's home page, rather than the blog. Alternatively, please provide an (obvious) link to the home page elsewhere on the blog.

tomjen33• 14 years ago

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.

jwallaceparker• 14 years ago

Prison should be for violent crimes.

This kind of thing should be settled in civil court - as it is.

tomjen33• 14 years ago

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

matthew_tovbin• 14 years ago

Instead of wasting my time I use MrNumber app (http://mrnumber.com) to block unwanted calls and texts.

pbhjpbhj3• 14 years ago

>But first, you might wonder why this post is on the blog for a company that sells telemarketing software. //

I assume to boost backlinks. What's more link-baity than a telemarketer mouthing off about telemarketers?

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Profitable, commendable, and a fine example to us all, but BORING!!!!!

Before I go on, yes, I do have way too much time on my hands, and a hugely immature area in my brain.

I like to go for creative abuse. Immediately I start arguing and generally giving them a hard time, winding up to virtual verbal abuse until....

...two things happen. They hang up, and never call back. Bonus: I feel better for getting some stuff off my chest. Dirt cheap therapy which they pay for!!!! Triple win. Yay!!!!

Dunno what its like in the US but here in the UK it seems that these people are not allowed to hang up. Big no no, from what I can tell. So, a great game is to time how quickly you can get them to hang up, or how long they can last out.

Should I grow up and generally get some sort of life? Yeah, probably.

rytis• 14 years ago

Not sure about verbal abuse... I try to stay polite however annoying they might be.

I've tried to countersell stuff, just for fun. "listen, glad you called, coincidentally I have this great 6 yr old laptop, which you might be interested in. It's only £239.99. What do you think? I accept paypal..."

Once I got transfered to a "team lead", who prommised to think about it and call back. He never did...

jrockway2• 14 years ago

My favorite feature of Google Voice is the "block caller" button. Works like a charm.

rdtsc4• 14 years ago

I am sure these people are smarter than just using a single number. They can just use random number every time.

You could for example have a white-list but that's won't quite work for most people.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

They could use a random number every time, but they don't. If they start doing that, I'll enable Google Voice's feature that requires an unknown caller to say their name before the phone call is accepted.

webjprgm• 14 years ago

Yay! I hate telemarketing calls.

There are 3 I tend to get. 2 of them are from places that I clearly did give my number too, one of which is a non-profit I've asked to stop calling me and the other is a car company that keeps trying to get me to trade in my car. The third is something in spanish that starts off with "felicitations, eres el ganador ..." which is where I hang up every time. Fortunately those have become rare lately. All are to my personal cell phone.

I'm glad to hear someone did something in one case.

My grandpa has long had the habit of shoving junk mail into the business reply envelopes for other junk mail. Hilarious, but I'm not quite that mean. But my grandpa used to work for the USPS, so maybe it's his way of supporting his old employer. :-)

burnvictim• 14 years ago

I think the problem with the car trade-in and the Spanish call (I've heard it is a content sign-up type of thing) is that it's possible they're not even legit businesses. I'm guessing it's going to be really tough, if not impossible to find out the owner, let alone sue them and get any money.

I would LOVE to do that, though.

septerr• 14 years ago

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.

paulgb• 14 years ago

I did that (faking interest to get their info) once and they harassed me for weeks. If you don't intend to take them to court, I wouldn't recommend it.

cowkingdeluxe• 14 years ago

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.

prawn• 14 years ago

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

smallegan• 14 years ago

Bravo impactdialing.com this is a brilliant SEO play and will no doubt get you lots of backlinks related to telemarketing!

nemik• 14 years ago

"Now, I actually hope that telemarketers call me – it’s easy money."

Did he just opt-in on his own website?

readme2• 14 years ago

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.

readme2• 14 years ago

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

crumblan2• 14 years ago

He only sued for the first few times (before he tried to get their information) and the last few times (after he asked not to be called again).

pg2• 14 years ago

Maybe this is true. But I'm glad HN has a feature that lets us mark a story so that it becomes a nofollow link no matter how many points it has.

akanet• 14 years ago

Could you elaborate? I thought the story was somewhat in the hacker spirit in that it exploited the oft-overlooked option of retaliating against spammers.

rmc• 14 years ago

pg is doubting if this story is true, and thinks it might be a nice "stick it to the man" story. Since it's linked here it might be a SEO attempt to get a higher Google ranking for words like "telemarketer".

imurray• 14 years ago

I don't see a rel="nofollow" attribute on the link to the original post, or a meta tag in the page header(?). (Logged in or not.)

pg2• 14 years ago

Oops, there was a bug in that code that I just fixed.

gbrindisi• 14 years ago

I recorded a voice mail suited specifically for telemarketers. It's basically me faking a call and some interest to keep them busy ("Hello, yes... yes... ah-a.... umh...") and ending with "sorry mate you were talking to a voice mail, now would you like to leave a serious message?".

I did it because I gave up trying to opt-out of every company calling me. The point is to irk them by keeping them on the phone (they are paid mainly by commissions so every second wasted counts) to the point they will flag me as a 'time-waster' and not call anymore.

It works surprisingly well.

I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

Related Stories