Do Not Call Me
After a few years of relative peace, the phone spammers seem to have discovered my home number again. I’ve gotten two calls in the last fifteen minutes, one from Mark Marshall at Ambit Energy (though I’m certain he lied about his name) and one from Daniel of the Police Conference of New York (one of those scummy organizations that tries to sell you stickers to put in your car with the implicit promise that this will keep you from getting tickets). There have been quite a few others in the last few weeks too.
I suspect some of these are jumping the gun on the expiry of the federal Do-Not-Call list. The FTC claims:
Your registration will not expire. The Federal Trade Commission will not drop any telephone numbers from the National Do Not Call Registry based on a five-year expiration period pending final Congressional or agency action on whether to make registration permanent. Read more about it at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2007/10/dnctestimony.shtm.
I think it’s time to start filing some complaints. In fact, I think the next time this happens I’m going to hold the caller on the phone while I fill out the complaint form.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:36 PM
Scummy they may or may not be, but non-profit they definitely are, and therefore exempt from the DNC rules.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:44 AM
Buy a whistle.
December 18th, 2007 at 7:09 AM
Google for the name of the organization that called or for their phone number if you got it with *69 or caller ID and you may find discussion about it, even if the number is fake (numbers appearing on caller id can be faked by various means and it’s recently become easier). There’s a website where people post about these calls and you may find the number of the telemarketing company that placed the call on behalf of the organization. You can call the telemarketer and get yourself off of all the lists they have you on, sometimes.
There’s a real NYC agency that investigates these police organizations. Keep track of how often the organization calls and whether they hang up without saying anything and whatever else they do that may be illegal so you have something juicy to report aside from just being annoyed. I think I found that agency through the NY Police Dept. website, which advises not to donate to those organizations because of the small amount that actually goes to any cause.
By the way, I need a non-Verizon/Optimum Online/Speakeasy ISP too. Please let me know if you found one.