By Jon Markman, CommLawBlog, May 12, 2014
Ignore the FCCs warnings at your financial peril.
Telemarketing is a fact of modern life, mainly because it can be a very efficient and effective way to communicate a message (commercial, political, etc.) to a huge audience. But that doesn't mean that the audience necessarily likes to receive telemarketed messages: many, perhaps most, consumers don't. That's probably even truer when it comes to "robocalls" (i.e., calls that are dialed automatically or play prerecorded messages), a type of unsolicited marketing that involves no actual human interaction, at least on the robocallers end. And it's probably truer still when the robocall is directed to a cell phone or mobile device where the recipient can end up paying for the minutes.
Responding to public sentiment more than two decades ago, Congress (in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)) banned the use of automatic calling (both live and prerecorded) to mobile devices except in emergency situations or when the company has the express written consent of the recipient of the call. In contrast to landline numbers, mobile phone subscribers don't have to put their numbers on the Governments Do-Not-Call list to get this protection. Continued:
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Neal McLain