[telecom] How do you get your number off a list so that it's gone, gone

I had the same happen. Well sort of. Different parties. I'd get a call asking for money. The first time they called they informed me there was a $75 minimum donation. I pointed out I was on the "Do Not Call" list. They quickly pointed out they're exempt. I explained I knew that, but I would like them to honor that still. They told me they didn't have to. I explained that I'm not going to give them any money and if they continue to call I will not only never give them money, but I will give money to their opponent and vote for their opponent. That actually did the trick despite me living in a conservative county and congressional district in Texas. Me voting for a Democrat would be as effective as spitting into the wind.

The one that really irks me are charities. I politely ask them not to call me and I get an earful that they're exempt from the DNC list. Again, I know that, but I still don't want them calling. I have a unique last name (the spelling) and I get calls from bill collectors looking for people with that last name. I had American Express and a mortgage company calling almost daily looking for Melvin Mayson. No idea who that is. Since we disconnected our home number the problem has gone away.

Lately I've gotten in the habit of giving out my Google Voice number since I can easily block callers. Last spring I signed up for 30 days of a free investment paper. I never got it but did get calls (to Google Voice) and emails asking I [wanted to] get a paid subscription. I told them that I wasn't going to pay for something that they couldn't get to me for free and I wasn't interested. I ended up simply blocking them. 2 or 3 weeks ago I logged into my GV account and saw they are STILL calling me. Almost 8 or 9 months later I'm still getting calls. They're blocked so I don't get bothered. You'd think they'd just give up.

John

Holding a Touchtone button down for several seconds followed by a hang-up is one option.

You're absolutely right. The logical solution to this problem of wrong numbers would be to require that those who call lists to report their experience with out of date information to the list broker and for the list broker in turn to report it to the source he obtained it from. Also, the call center should be able to tell the called party the source of the name.

But here's what happens in practice. Political organizations are exempt from maintaining or using Do Not Call registries, which were themselves a highly imperfect solution to telemarketing. Political fundraising is subject to disclosure under federal and state law, so if a contributor gives an amount greater than a couple of hundred bucks, his name is known and readily available to the list consolidators. Typically, a phone number would not be part of the disclosure, but name and address, and under federal law, employer, would be.

The list consolidators, in turn, use extremely fuzzy matches to assign phone numbers to names. Political organizations are allowed to use voter registration lists which business solicitors cannot, so those are often sources of phone numbers. Hint: When registering to vote, no state law requires disclosure of your phone number, so do not disclose it.

Otherwise they get phone numbers from credit reports or lists of customers that businesses have sold, etc. Even out of date phone record matches are more current than some of this other information they use.

But list consolidators and information brokers don't care about the quality of the data they provide. They just want as many hits as possible. I've mentioned before about a phone number that was never installed that nevertheless got sold to list brokers, and then with fuzzy matching, the wrong address was associated with the billing name and phone number.

Thanks to very soft indexing criteria, you can never get off a list because the list itself was assembled from weak criteria. Bad information never expires and will match future index searches.

They only know that you're an angry voter, and _angry_ voters get the most attention. After all, modern telecommunications cuts both ways: a faxed picture of the candidate meeting could be in every NRA office in the country within 48 hours.

Send a letter to the directors and/or trustees. Ask them to be sure it stops. It usually will.

Write a letter to the CEO of each company. Tell them you're talking to a reporter about the harassment. Remind them that they're breaking the law, that you're not Melvin, and that you deserve to be left alone.

Let me know what they do: I'm the reporter, so I'd like to follow up. ;-)

To a database designer, your phone number _is_ you. It changes so seldom that it's a good-as-it-gets way to track you, and unlike your Social Security Number, which Health Maintenance Organizations now have access to but most other companies don't, most consumers hand it over, without thinking, to any store clerk in the world, provided that it's not already on the check you give them or recorded with your "loyalty" card that gets scanned along with your groceries.

I always lie about my phone number when a store clerk asks for it: I don't mind being called by a human (I'm in the book), but I don't want my buying habits to be cross-referenced. Nobody has ever (pun intended) called me on it, and the phony numbers haven't shown up at online "411" sites, so I'm sure they ask in order to have a common database key.

Bill Horne

(Filter QRM for direct replies)

-- "Hunger in the midnight, hunger at the stroke of noon Hunger in the mansion, hunger in the rented room Hunger on the TV, hunger on the printed page And there's a God-sized hunger underneath the laughing and the rage" - Jackson Browne

Even though they're exempt from the national DNC list, they're all supposed to keep their own DNC list. I've had reasonably good luck with "put me on your do not call list, and don't call back."

The bill collectors are the worst, though. I have a reasonably common name and bill collectors just can't belive that even though I have never lived where their deadbeat lived, I was not born on the DOB they have, and my middle initial is different, I won't pay his bill anyway.

R's, John

I have my own solution:

(1) When the number is out of area and doesn't belong to someone already on my phone list, I ignore it and let it go to voicemail, likewise blocked numbers.

(2) When the number is 000-000-0000 or an 800 number or such, I save it in my phone list and change the ring to a cute tune that I use for nothing other than junk calls. Since I leave my phone on while I'm asleep I have trained myself to wake up only to ringing tones, not cute musical interludes. This is so much better for my sanity than trying to deal with "do not call" lists and other matters that require I talk to someone who couldn't care less about my annoyance.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I have a "smart" caller id box which can transfer calls to either of two RJ-11 jacks based on the area code, etc. Although it was effective at some things, such as diverting my son's calls to a different phone with a different ring tone, I finally got tired of having to constantly reprogram it for each new telemarketer's number.

I switched to a simpler device which answers the phone and demands an access code. After a couple of months of having it in use, I seem to have wound up on some "Don't even attempt to call this guy" list, so I'm able to leave it turned off.

Bill Horne Moderator

I'm not bothered nearly as much as you are. This may be because I don't have any landlines at all. I have used cell exclusively for the past 8 years. I also don't see telemarketing numbers change that often.

I'm not sure why the discrepancy. Maybe it's because I don't buy anything with credit cards, and don't have a white pages listing (though I have 3 prominent yellow pages listings).

This happens with the junk calls I get. They come in waves. I have taken to saving the numbers with names like "junk 0210" meaning that Feb 2010 was the first time I'd gotten a call from that number. If I get a call from the same number in, say, June, I'll change the name to "junk 0610". Periodically I go through the list of saved numbers and discard the old ones.

Political campaigns are temporary things. Even if they maintain an internal "do not call" list, it's doubtful that the information would be passed along to any other campaign.

They are simply exempt from commercial telephone solicitation laws and I do not believe that they are required to maintain internal lists.

A bill collector makes lots and lots of calls based on fuzzy matching. They are hoping that if they make enough of a pest of themselves that they will hit someone on the list of "related people" that actually knows the debtor and, just to get the calls to stop, will pass along the contact information to the bill collector.

When you state that you aren't the person, yeah, they believe you. They just don't care. They really want YOU to do their work for them. Next time, demand their commission.

I get all sort of political calls here. The saving grace, Google Voice. I signed up for a number and have it point at my main number. The nice thing is, you can teach Google voice to recognize numbers of people you WANT to hear from. If they call it rings through, if not they're asked to record their name at the tone and then it rings your phone and plays back the name. Based on that you can either accept or decline the call.

So now when I go to political sites and they request a phone number, they get the Google Voice number.

I have a nasty fix, when I get a call that is not in my phone book,the caller will get milliwatt. My friends all call my Google Voice number which is pointed to a private line that is not used or if I'm on the road my cell phone. I had an insurance broker trying to drum up business that would call me 3 or 4 times a day and reporting it did no good, the tone stopped it the first time.

Caller ID is worth its weight in gold. If you don't recognize the number don't answer it.

***** Moderator's Note *****

Privacy protection is like spam or virus prevention: it's an arms race. Those who call have learned to make caller-id less useful by either putting your own number on it, or "Out of Area", or an 800 number that they hope you'll be curious about.

The next step in the arms race will be active devices that demand a secret code, and after that will be active devices that demand the code from numbers the devices don't recognize.

In the future, (remember what I said about social maps?) those who seek to talk to you without your invitation will insert the phone number of one of your friends into the caller-id info, and you or your automatic screening device will answer the call without thinking.

You heard it here first.

Bill Horne Moderator

First, they would have to know their intended prey's friends. That is a quantum jump.

And, anyone who might get curious about an 800 number is not well trained at all. ;-)

We have been doing quite nicely in our little home with audible caller ID (Meridian 9516), at&t privacy manager, at&t voice mail, and the

9516's voice mail.

It has been in a stable state for perhaps 10 years now. We have yet to take the bait.

It does require self-control. My wife took longer to come up to speed (she is not a phone phreak) but today she is bullet-proof. Any doubt whatsoever the identified call goes to the 9516's voice mail. And, of course, they seldom leave a message.

***** Moderator's Note *****

This may be a left-handed compliment, but you are clearly an outlyer on this particular (pun intended) Bell curve. What I said about social maps is basically that the current generation of teenagers has grown up in an environment where they have given away, without realizing it, the last bastion of privacy available to the common man: the names of their friends. By using social-networking services and sites (everything from AIM to Facepage), computer "savvy" children have allowed major database suppliers to assemble lists of those they grew up with and whom they are willing to talk to without hesitation: they will soon find out the cost of that carelessness when pitchmen of all stripes, be they life-insurance salesmen or bill collectors, will use that information to catch them off-guard. That is not a "quantum jump", nor even a paradigm shift: it's a incremental increase in the number and effectiveness of the weapons available to those who seek to part customers from their money. It _will_ happen.

I'm of a different mind about what constitutes 'victory' in this battle: you feel that you have 'won' because you have prevented unknown persons from reaching you by telephone. I, however, feel I win only when I'm not aware that an attempt was made, i.e., when my quiet enjoyment of my home and my family can't be interrupted by anyone I have not chosen to allow. The only bait I'm willing to have in my life is at the end of _my_ fishing hook.

Bill Horne Moderator

Your point is well taken. But, I have indeed won within the constraints of the technology and my motivation. Well, there is one option with the 9516 that goes closer to your goal. That is name-only announce. Thus, only the numbers with a voice tag in my name will announce and those will no voice tag will remain silent (instead of being announced by Miss Nortel). I haven't done this because I am too lazy to tag all my wife's friends. But, if I had your determination it would indeed work exactly as you want.

***** Moderator's Note *****

It's a question of degree, not of determination. I may be determined to avoid annoyance calls altogether, and you may be determined to retain the ability to choose what calls to answer on a case-by-case basis. Both approaches accomplish the goals that were set out.

This is, as I said, an arms race. The defender's dilemma applies.

I've been getting machine-initiated announcement calls, usually at

6-6:30 AM, about once a week from one of the local school districts ever since I moved here. I have no kids, and the callers don't identify themselves (or it's at the end of a several-minute spiel that I don't wait for).

Are these people exempt from the DNC list (which I'm on)? Or from California's no-robocalls law? Any help would be appreciated, but it's gotten to the point that I don't just want to find the right flunky and nicely ask him/her to de-list me: I want a judge to make an example of that agency that will deter other agencies from taking up this practice.

***** Moderator's Note *****

It's likely that the number used to be assigned to a family with school-aged children. Your best bet is to write a letter TWIMC, and send it to the School Department. This will save you the aggravation of finding whichever flunky is empowered to delete your number from the list, and the expense of hiring an attorney to get a judge to order them to do it.

Bill Horne Moderator

In the recent similar situation I had and posted about here, I was able to identify the school from the recorded robo call message. Unfortunately it took several calls and an email to the school principle to get the number delisted from their system.

Slightly more annoying than the "school delayed" calls at 5AM was the complaint by the school staff that they had no easy way of identifying the student name by just the phone number and that they had to manually look at 500 records to figure out who the number was previously assigned to.

I find it difficult to believe that their system doesn't have a search function, but my heart bleeds (not). If they want to use such a system, they better be prepared to manage it properly. And that means shutting down such calls after one request.