Dave Barry Strikes Back Against Telemarketers

ikkonoishi writes "The Miami humor columnist Dave Barry in his column here encouraged his readers to exercise their constitutional rights to call a telemarketing firm which had declared the National Do Not Call List unconstitutional. Well it seems to have worked." Needless to say, the targets of the prank were none so keen on being called themselves.

Maybe Dave Barry could start a ternd.

[acarr0]

I have oftened wished that I could do what Dave Barry has done. Particularly annoying are the recorded messages that I continue to get on m business line. On occasion I have called the 800 numbers to express my displeasure. Simply calling in ones and twos isn't going to work. What we really need is for someone to organize a web site where people can report these incidents. If we all band together and call these companies 800 numbers simply to express our viewpoint then maybe this activity will become too expensive for companies to exploit anymore. Anyone up for it?

Revenge

[Christoff84]

Maybe we can simply get a dialing machine and have it call the telemarketers non-stop.

why worry?

[VanillaCoke420]

Why are the telemarketing companies worried? This list of people who do not wish to be called, are probably people who wouldn't buy anything from them in the first place. This list should be welcomed as it prevent them from making 30 million calls on which they will not make any money on.

Re:The ends justify the means?

[SlamMan]

Interfered with somebody's ability to make a living? Since when is that a right? If I've got a business model of strangling small children (or something legal thats equally offensive), other people have a right hinder me in anyway they legally can.

Profit is not its own justification. Thats the sort of thinking that arms dealers and the RIAA use (like how I tied those together?).

Re:The ends justify the means?

[pla]

but in the end you're just sinking to the telemarketers' level.

Although I agree with you in principle, I think you missed the bigger issue...

The Telemarketers insist that they have a constitutionally protected right to harass us, even after we have added our names to a federally-maintained list saying that we would really rather not have them call us.

This mass calling, while superficially petulant, demonstrates that a right to call and harass people works both ways, if they want to play that game.

Think of this as no different than signing Ralsky up for every junkmail catalog in the world... While childish, it does get the message across - "We hate you and everything you do, so please shrivel up and die, preferably in some painful manner that involves your loathesome occupation". Well, perhaps not quite that verbose, but they get the idea.


Is this really something that needs to be worsened by giving ideas to the industrious - but idle-minded masses on slashdot? The damage can only be worsened here!

Oh, Pshaw! I expect we'll reach 70 or 80 comments before someone thinks to post the home phone numbers of various telemarketing company's CEOs (hint, hint, c'mon, someone out there has those suckers, post em!).


Do the ends justify the means? No.

Hey, the telemarketers already presented a number of points describing why we have a right to call and harass them. We all just want to congratulate them for their hard work. And hey, since the DNC registry would cost them two million jobs, if enough of us keep calling, perhaps they can re-hire those two million to field the inbound calls. So you see, we have simply found a way, by all pulling together, to save two million jobs in an otherwise bad economy. ;-)

Re:Number is Toll Free!

[Oswald]

So now it's a tort to call a toll-free phone number? One that's listed on the contact page of their website? I'd like to see them make that stick.

And, I think I speak for most of us here when I say I don't give a shit about these people's livelihoods. Next time they should get a job that doesn't make them a public nuisance (and a target for anger and aggression--don't they have any self-respect?).

Do not call lists will lower sales

[GGardner]

The NYT ran an article about this a while back -- they interviewed people who didn't want to buy things from unsolicited phone calls, but ended up doing so anyways, because they "felt sorry" for the person making the phone call. One woman they interviewed bought 5 $1k replacement windows, which she later admitted, "probably wasn't a good idea". She also said that she would sign up for a do not call list, to prevent her from mercy purchases in the future.

Don't think that the telemarketters don't know their own business.

Re:Revenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas, I fail to see how calling someone non-stop could be anything but non-profit. It's not cheap to call nowadays.

Re:wrong...

[acceleriter]

I can tell you I'm a counterexample. If someone knocks on my door in spite of the "NO SOLICITING" sign, they get the door in their face, and a followup from the local gendarmes asking about their permit (which they almost never have) to solicit.

Just like ant-spammer tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave Barry has a good idea here - just as spammers get their details posted on the web and people sign them up for all sorts of unsolicited (e)mail, phone numbers of members of the American Teleservices Association should be made available so that they can experience the joys of unsolicited calls. Obviously, they won't be on the 'do not call' register, so it should be perfectly legal.

Re:Revenge

[BrokenHalo]

You'll see them go for upward of $10k on ebay now and again.

Easy enough to do if you still have an old dialup modem hanging around, though, and the time to write a little script...

Third time's a charm

[Maserati]

Here's a telemarketing situation where I'm just waiting for the payoff. Our office has several blocks of 100 numbers each, most of which aren't in use and are forwarded to the front desk (because a client may have an old number). Some months ago a mortgage company started autodialing our blocks. Our receptionist went from calm to frothing at the mouth in 60 seconds flat, and eveyone else was getting either a hangup call or a voicemail left for them.

I called the 800 number in the voicemail I personally received, got a manager on the line in record time (it helps if you sound like you want to confirm your satellite recon for the imminent airstrike) and explained that we had a block of numbers, that they were calling ALL of them and to please stop right-fucking-now. I then did the usual bit about do not call lists and a copy of the policy (which I never got). The do not call list was tough, since numbnuts didn't grok the "I have several hundred consecutive numbers" part very well.

The next day they did it again. I got another manager on the line, who was significantly less than understanding about the whole affair. In point of fact, he seemed dismissive of the whole fact that I had complained the day before and tha the was perhaps a bit offended that I was trying to interfere with his attempt to rescue a failing mortgage business. I reminded him about the FCC's $500 per call regulation and he got offended. Go figure. Apaprently the fact that the Federal government might put him out of business wasn't a factor in his worldview. I rang off.

And called the local police department and reported a couple hundred harassing phone calls. I leaned heavily on the second manager's attitude toward my request of the previous day and on his utter disregard for Federal codes covering his business. I named both managers in the complaint. These guys are less than fifty miles from us and in the same state, so it could happen.

We have a case number. Some day they'll screw up, and then a telemarketing manager will do the Perp Walk. I'll be sure to put whatever details I can on a website so we can all share the joy.

Slashdotting over: number disconnected

[just fiddling around]

Hey! Salshdot gets more effective every day! The number has been disconnected.

Hurray for the /. effect!

True story

[acalford]

I work for the IT department of a small, rural hospital near New Orleans. Which means people call me about problems with everything from their PC to their fax machine. It may not be part of my job description, but I'll try to help them with their problem if I can...

One day a couple of weeks ago, I had a very frustrated message on my voice mail from the director of our Radiology department. It seems that the phone in one of the diagnostic imaging rooms would ring, and when someone would pick it up it was a recorded message from a telemarketing company.

If it had happened once, she probably would have wrote it off to a mistake. Instead, it kept calling the number. Continuously. For a half hour, by the time she'd left me that message. Now, as you can imagine, having the telephone in a MEDICAL PROCEDURE AREA continuously ringing is a bad thing. Not to mention that line now being tied up so that in an emergency the techs can't call for help.

I ran (literally) down to the department, picked up the phone the next time it rang, and recorded the call. After about two minutes, a real human picked up the line.

Said human began reading her script when I asked her if she knew what phone number this was. I then told her that at that moment, I was standing in an x-ray room, in a hospital, with a patient who was supposed to be getting tested right now but because we kept having to pick up the EMERGENCY PHONE they were just kind of lying there moaning (at which point the director standing next to me made the most pitiful moaning noises, heh, heh) and we would like to GET HER OFF THE TABLE IF YOU PEOPLE HAD NO OBJECTIONS...

There was a moment of silence, then prolific appologies, a promise to stop the calls, more appologies...After leaving her flopping on the end of the hook for a moment, I accepted her appology, took her name and number, then hung up.

The phone never rang again.

Re:Even Better

[WindBourne]

Tim, I am an online journalist and am writing an article about Dave Berry recent article. I am trying to get some feedback from you about why you think that you have the right to call millions of homes, but you do not feel that millions have the right to call your home
It is amazing what legal rights and latitudes all journalists are allowed.

Re:Even Better

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ataconnect.org/contact.htm
Check it out - you can use them as a spam relay. View the source - the to field is in there and hidden. Hmmmmm.... ;-)

Automate the registration.

[chrome]

It's a bit underhanded, I know, and some people might actually LIKE getting called by telemarketers - but it struck me that it would be rather easy to automate adding every phone number listed in the United States to the DNC registry.

Write a script that hits the page, enters in 3 phone numbers, waits for the mail to be sent to an address it generates on the fly, 'clicks' the link, rinse, repeat.

No telemarketing! :D

Ok, Bad Idea. I should remember where I'm writing this. Someone is likely to go off and do it.

Re:The ends justify the means?

[Anonymous Coward]

How anyone could consider your post as anything other than an attempt to attract flames (i.e. the very definition of flamebait) is beyond me. Agree with the guy or disagree on the MERITS of the comment. But if all you got is that religion has warped his brain, well frankly, that's flamebait and it should be moderated as such.

You heard it here first

[smoondog]

You heard it here first:

When the do not call list takes effect, I predict the reincarnation of the door to door salesman.

(Besides, haven't you always wanted to know what that telemarketer type person on the other end of the line looks like?)

-Sean

Always call back...

[gesualdo]

The other day I got a call from a telemarketer who wanted me to change my phone service (for the low, low monthly price of $49.90/month). For some reason I felt compassion for this bloke who called, and I didn't tell him to go fuck himself outright (although it would have been well within my right, since my ass-cheeks had just landed on the toilet seat, and I was ready to unload.) Anyway, so I was nice, and feigned interest, and asked if they had DSL, and yada yada yada. And then asked all the questions that they're supposed to be legally bound to answer (their name, company's name, address, phone number, etc). Around this time, the guy starts to get annoyed, since it's been almost 60 seconds that we've been talking. He gives me his name and address, when I (honestly) realize I don't have a pen, so I ask him to hold on a second. Ten seconds later, I've got a pen and paper, and I copy down his name as well as the company's. When I ask for the address and his employee ID number, he gets all snotty, and taunts me with, "What are you going to do, come up here and arrest me? I'm in Vancouver." I explain, still politely, that he is the one that called me, and that as I understand the law, he is required to give me certain, specific information about himself and his company. When I start to ask for his address again, he get's all pissy, and abruptly hangs up.

Now, normally, I'd say fuck it, and go on with my day, but he taunted me with that "what are you going to do" attitude, so I say fuck him. A few googles for his company (RSVP Customer Care Centre) later, I find the website (after getting arond their silly spelling of "center"), and the name of his boss, the VP of Sales and Marketing. She was very kind and apologetic, and she seemed honestly surprised by Joe's reaction to me on the line; for four year he had been a model employee. And for Joe, fair enough, his job probably does suck with people giving him shit all the time; still, at the same time, there's a certain amount of professionalism that I expect from these guys. Maybe he was just rude because he knew he'd be out of a job when the DNC list goes into effect.

Anyway, my (elusive) point, call their bosses and bitch, especially if they're rude or unprofessional.

Re:Even Better

[jacobcaz]

Searcy, Tim
8645 Admirals Woods Dr
INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46236
317-823-8462

Oh great - I find out they're in my home town... Well Mr. Searcy makes to damn much money; the sub-division he lives in is in of our higher-income areas where all the quasi-celebs and most of the sports stars (Reggie Miller) live.

I'll take donations to go and TP his house! :-)

5% of the US labor force?

[invckb]

ATA officials have said about 2 million of the 6.5 million people working at telemarketing call centers across the nation will lose their jobs because of the rules that established the nationwide "Do Not Call" list.

so 5% of the USA's 140 million labor force work as telemarketers? Why did the journalist let them get away with those numbers?

Re:Even Better

[LakeSolon]

While calling the business to register complaints seems perfectly reasonable to me, calling the employees at home about their business might have some issues involved with it.

So call and try to sell them something... like maybe your chair. Be courteous but make sure they're made aware of all the benefits of owning your chair for a few (157) easy payments of just 196.95.

~Lake

Re:Number is Toll Free!

[ahoehn]

Actually, I was a volunteer at a hospital in Belize this past year for six months. I assisted a surgeon in around 30-40 surgeries over the course of my time there. About half of our surgeries would be interrurpted by one of the doctor's phones ringing. The circulating nurse would reach inside the doctor's operating gown, take the cellphone from his belt, answer and then tell the doctor who was calling. If the call was important enough and the surgery wasn't at a time-critical moment, the surgeon would have the nurse hold the phone up to his ear, so he didn't become un-sterile by touching it with his hands, and then have a phone conversation while the rest of us, and the sedated patient, waited. The first time it happened it was all very surreal.

Of course I don't mean to imply that this has any correlation to the national do not call registry, or that surgeons typically answer their phones during surgery in more developed countries. I hope.

Do to their mail server what they do to our phones

[Anonymous Coward]

You can send them a completely anonymous email using their own mail server by modifying their contact us page, available at http://www.ataconnect.org/contact.htm [ataconnect.org]

It uses the popular formmail.pl script and it's poorly configured. View the source to the page and save it to your hard drive. Then edit the code where the

<form>

tag starts.

First, modify the action value to include the fully qualified path to the formmail.pl script as such:

action="http://www.ataconnect.org/cgi-bin/formmail /FormMail.pl"

Then, remove the following lines:

<input TYPE="hidden" name="required" value="First_Name,Last_Name,Email">

<input type="hidden" name="env_report" value="REMOTE_ADDR,HTTP_USER_AGENT">

Save your changes and open up the page that's saved on your hard drive. Now you can put whatever the hell you want in the form and it actually gets sent. If you want, you can also change the address it gets sent to by changing the following line in the code:

<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="[e-mail]">

(Note: manually modify the code rather than copying and pasting, because Slashdot's anti-troll space-adding would cause it not to work.)

<disclaimer>

......Of course, this is all just FYI type blathering in the spirit of open source hacking and I do not advocate anybody writing a script to exploit this poor design.

</disclaimer>

How has Telemarketing *Ever* been legal?

[milesObrien]

AFAIK, I've never seen this argument used as a legal basis to end TM: the simple premise that my telephone service is a paid, private service. Commercial solicitation over a private service I pay for should not be legal. I've never heard of a class action suit against TM's on this principle.

I expect some degree of spam and advertising from web-based mail like yahoo- I don't pay for my Yahoo mail account. But if I *did* upgrade to the paid premium level- then I expect not to receive unsolicited emails (if I never posted my email address to any forum, newsgroup or website) nor see any advertising anywhere on the web client.

Similarly, my paid private voice service shouldn't be a conduit for unsolicited commercial interests.

The only legal way TM makes sense is if I choose to appear on a "Commercial Solicitation OK" list. Then, I need to be compensated for every phone ring by a commercial interest calling me- whether I answer or not! TM's are abusing my time in distraction and using a paid resource in my home- the phone ringer and the single phone line, which another personal contact may be trying to use to reach me during the TM's attempt to call. The remuneration from each TM call ought to appear as a credit on my phone statement- again, only if I volunteer to be on a "OK to call" list.

Telemarketing has *nothing* to do with freedom of speech, or the rights of commercial interests in any way shape or form. It is about exploiting (current) holes in the interpretation of personal privacy rights and abusing private communication services.

Another post in this thread mentioned placing an indicator in current phone books next to personal name listings, a flag that means "no solicitors". Why this hasn't been available yet is dumb-founding, as it is no different than the ability to put a "NO Solicitors" sign on your front door (of your physical home).