Verizon telemarketers violating laws? [telecom]

I received a telespam today from someone identifying herself as being with Verizon. She asked if I was the person in charge of the RCN account. Well, yes, my phone comes from RCN. How does Verizon know this though? Telephone accounts are customer proprietary network information (CPNI), aren't they? RCN isn't selling its customer lists to its competitors. The phone line in question is provided off of RCN's cable, not leased Verizon loops. It is not a number ported from Verizon; RCN owns both the thousands-block and the A-block of the NPA-NXX. Thus the number doesn't even need to appear in the NPAC number portability database. About the only way they could sort of legally know about it is because it is listed, and if they checked NPAC and didn't see it, they'd know it belonged to the A-block holder. But it's not kosher to use NPAC data for marketing. Carriers are only supposed to use their caches of it for directing calls.

So I asked her how she knew I used RCN. First she lied that it was really Verizon's line. This is a standard telesleaze trick of theirs, to claim that facilities-based CLECs are actually resellers. I said that it wasn't, then she said it was Verizon's turf and therefore they knew. Then she made some kind if insulting remark that I'm pretending to know a lot but don't; then she hung up. Little does she know that I professionally deliver expert witness work against ILECs!

Just to top it off, the Caller ID was "Name Unavailable" from "1-987-654-3210". Yeah, right. I wonder if that violates any truth in Caller ID laws.

Reply to
Fred Goldstein
Loading thread data ...

That's the mark of a frustrated, wannabee colon cleanse salesperson. They always vent their spleen just before they hang up and hope for a dope on the next call.

Telemarketing, like spam, is an arms race: the good nature of middle class citizens provided the vermin with an easy living, until their victims demanded action by the congresscritters, and the do-not-call list worked until the marketeers realized that they are in the neutral zone between congressional apathy and legal indifference.

The next step is that everyone will buy an electronic butler. In a way, the DNC worked: it gave ordinary people a taste of what privacy and quiet enjoyment of our homes feels like, and now those same people will get mad and take individual action.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne

I get very few if any telemarketer calls on my cell phone. Probably because I call block the really egregious stuff and block a lot of

800/888/877 numbers.
Reply to
T

It's not a problem that you can solve with blocking per se: that's the whole point. They want your ears on their pitchman's speech, and they'll break any law that seeks to slow them down, and they'll re-re-re-program their auto-dialers to use ever-more-obscure CID info so that you /can't/ block it.

The only way to eliminate abuses of the Do-not-call list is to force the violators to spend time talking to electronic butlers or real people before they can get to you, and thus to make their rate-of- return so low that they go out of business. They will, of course, rely more and more on pre-recorded pitches, but those have so small a "hit" rate that they'll still have to spend the time to get through to you if they want to sell you something.

With an electronic butler guarding your phone line, and demanding a security code that they don't have and can't guess in time, their paradigm will, finally, be broken.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne

snip

Bill -

Do you have any current brands to suggest? Several months back I found an entire line that looked promising only to find that the company had gone out of business, as had several others with similar offerings (perhaps they were all sourcing the same machines from China and the that shop went under). Or, maybe the telemarketers and buying and killing these manufacturers..

Thanks,

Frank

Reply to
Frank Stearns

You're just lucky. I get tons of junk calls on my cell phone, clearly because it is on sucker lists that junk callers trade.

I've never given them anything more than instructing them to take me off their list and then die, so I can only imagine what the previous holder of the number did.

Reply to
John Levine

(I originally read your last sentence as "bullying and killing", but I don't think we're at that stage yet. ;-) )

I don't have any manufacturers in mind: my device is also "MD", and I have been thinking about getting a low-end Asterisk PBX, but I've been busy with work and have had to make do with the usual answering machine.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne

I very seldom get telemarketing calls. In fact, I cannot remember getting one in the last few years. I have had my numbers on the national DNC list for a very long time.

I rarely get survey calls either. When I have, I simply tell them that I do not do surveys and please do not waste their time or mine by calling me again.

For me, it works. When I hear all of this crying about it not working, I wonder what people are doing to compromise their privacy.

Regards,

Fred

Reply to
Fred Atkinson

I think it has to do more with luck of the draw than anything. Ie. I too get very few telemarketing calls, the only ones I get are ones that would be permitted via the do-not-call rules.

BUT, my home phone # is in an NPA-NXX that is not very populated, ie. very few #s have ever been allocated in it since the area code split

13-14 years ago, and most #s are intercepts. And my cell NPA-NXX's are from very old-school cell phone allocation to the original smaller wireless carriers that were long bought out and are part of the conglomerates now (ie. Aerial Communications).

So, I don't think my #s are "attractive" to the war-dialers and such that the bad-players use, since there are so little hits.

I'd imagine that densly populated NPA-NXX's, especially in the main area, instead of a semi-recent split is much more attractive to the war-dialers.

Reply to
Doug McIntyre

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.