I'm just wondering if my experience was typical... During the week up to the election, my home land line got between 10 and 20 recorded "robocalls" from political campaigns. (10 were on the Caller ID box, but we answered many others promptly enough that they weren't logged.)
All of them, as far as I could tell, were on behalf of Republicans.
Many were duplicates (two identical or very similar calls a few minutes apart).
On election day, they started arriving one minute apart and my daughter took the phone off the hook.
Will the new Democratic administration ban robocalls? PLEASE?
A couple of years ago we got many calls, I finally was able to reach the local party and made it clear that if the calls did not stop, I would vote for whoever was running against the person calling and tell everyone I knew to do the same. I don't know if they took any action, but I not received a call since. I do get telemarketing calls, even thoug I'm on the Don't Call list. One company told me that since they are located in Canada they don't have to comply with Stupid US Lawa; as he put it. I complained to the FTC and the FCC, they said it w ould take hundreds of complaints to take action even if the could. I complained to the BBB in Ontario, Canada where they were located, that ended the calls.
As far as changing the law; when Hell freezes over.
Up here with our new DNC list now in effect, we have actually seen a reduction in calls lately. While many calls come from the States still, the regulation states that if the calls are on behalf of a Canadian company, they are bound by the new law, and the company is responsible for any calls made on their behalf to Canadian customers.
As a lot of our DNC regulations appear to be based upon the US legislation, it would be interesting to know if the same ruling exists there.
By the way, we are only four days into our holiday from calls - I signed up the first of last month when the list was inagurated, and it takes 31 days for the DNC listing to propogate to all companies. It will be interesting to see how it works out in the long run. One of our worst and most persistant callers (at least one call/day) was Capitol One's robo-call thrying to sell credit cards. Tee Hee! I haven't heard from them in the past four days! The calls were mostly timed to co-incide with suppertime. Yay!
Dave
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Don't think you are somehow being targeted. I'm in a "battleground" state (PA) and I got a dozen calls over the weekend and into Tuesday. I hung up on Sara Palin and (twice!) on Rudy Giulianii. This is the "norm" for politicians. Any hope for relief is bound to be killed by the first amendment to the Constitution. That guarantees our right to free speech, even over the telephone when it is severely annoying....The good news is that this kind of thing doesn't happen every week, only every couple of years.
No, it doesn't, or we wouldn't have a Do Not Call List. Free speech does not include the right to use my equipment or to intrude into my house. (Your argument was made by spammers long, long ago, and refuted.)
BTW, did you get any calls from Democrats or only Republicans?
Last local election, I was keeping count and I think we got something like two calls from Democrats and thirty-odd from Republicans over the course of the week.
The really annoying thing is that we got something like sixty hang-up calls where it was clear that the autodialer was getting ahead of the people operating it. Most of them were over a two-day period. I am not sure if these were all generated by Republicans or Democrats although I suspect they were all the result of a single candidate.
Surprisingly with the Federal elections, we have been getting a lot fewer calls. I doubt I have had more than a dozen this time around. Lots of spam e-mail, though, most of it due to Blue State Digital running a list for Obama supporters that had open subscription with no list confirmation.
Only republicans, no democrats. Actually the do not call list specifically excludes charities and political parties, likely due to who wrote the law (politicians courting charities). I fully agree with your view that they should be made subject to the do not call penalties also, but don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. All these robocalls are very annoying and ought to be banned.
No, Bell has never had a monopoly in Canada. Maybe in Ontario but that's it. We only introduced a Do Not Call list in September of 2008. Just in time to become irrelevant due to VOIP calling.
On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:44:00 -0500, Scott Dorsey wrote: ........
Outgoing ACDs should not "get ahead" of anything, they should be set up to have a maximum set number of queued calls which will depend on the number of live people available and the average call time.
I think "NO *ROBO*calls" is a perfectly legitimate restriction on political, charitable, commercial or any other kind of calls, just like restrictions on no guys carrying cardboard signs appearing in my bed at 3AM. Granted, it's not likely to ever happen [or to] restrict politicians.
NO ROBOcalls means no automated calls intended to be answered by a human (so it doesn't affect fax machines). That means no *OPT-IN* ROBOcalls. That means no "reverse 911" ROBOcalls. That means no ROBOcalls from schools telling me that my child was late to school (The school got rather upset when I demanded they produce the child and they couldn't - I don't have any children. I have no idea who the call was actually for.)
The way to fight ROBOcalls is to fill the airwaves with television commercials condemning politicians for ROBOcalls waking up children, being answered by children, and otherwise accusing the callers as being child abusers. Which, to the extent that the ROBOcalls disturb children, they ARE. Now, if only we could fund such a campaign by taxing campaign contributions to candidates.
While I'm at it, I'd like to propose that Congressional funding earmarks must be worn on the ears of sponsoring Congresscritters
*at all times*. They weigh 1 ounce per $1 million of funding. If the earmark is removed from the ear for any reason (including the opposition party [taking] it off, or the ear not being able to support the weight), the funding goes away.
There are people who give out false phone numbers. I know of a local business (I won't say who) that got constant calls for a woman they'd never heard of. They looked through their records and had never had an employee by that name, nor did any current employee recognize the name.
Most of the calls were from bill collectors, but some of them were things like the school calling her to tell her to come get her child (reason unclear), and eventually the police turned up looking for her (and were satisfied to be allowed to look through the personnel records; the place was obviously not a private residence).
Yes, precisely. I think part of the problem is that we have folks who set up a call center every two to four years for a couple days, and never see the system the rest of the time. Consequently their ability to target people properly and their ability to run the ACD system properly is sometimes a little rusty when it comes time to use it.
"reverse 911" is sure to degenerate into a call for every missing kid.
Do schools *really* accept information like that (address and phone number updates) from students, rather than parents? This was an elementary school. Many of the students (e.g. kindergarten and first grade) can't write well or at all, don't know their phone number, and some don't know their parents' names ("Mommy" and "Daddy" don't count). I do know that schools have parents fill out forms like this when they register the child in school.
Now, a 4th-grade kid could pull this off, but the school should be used to that and insist on communicating directly with the parents.
In some schools I'd think this is almost as foolhardy as letting the convicted prisoner carry a note from the judge to the maximum security jail's warden telling the warden what their sentence is.
The initial reference was to incoming calls - which must be directed to a number - so if the VoIP number is on a Do Not Call list it works exactly the same as any other number, doesn't it?
If your outgoing VoIP service does not have a legitimate incoming number, then what do you care about Do Not Call lists as you will never receive calls anyway?
I would have imagined that these people would be using 3rd-party services for this sort of thing (because it is so infrequent) and those "experts" would set things up correctly?
I was driven nuts for a few days by a school calling my number to reach parents. it was an automatic system and took me a bit to figure it out. I was still working for the phone company and gave the number to them, it was one of ours. I contacted the school and was told that was the number that was given. I informed them they had it wrong and besides they were some 20 miles from me. I never heard from them again, so I have no idea if they wrote it down wrong or they were given a wrong number.
With so many cell phone now and people dialing while they drive I get at least 2 calls a week from people dialing wrong. Most of the time it is just the one call, but some must be so stupid to just hit redial and can't figure why they got the wrong number again.
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