WASHINGTON -- So much for silence from telemarketers at the dinner hour, or any other hour.
Complaints
to the government are up sharply about unwanted phone solicitations,
raising questions about how well the federal "do-not-call" registry is
working.
The biggest category of complaint:
those annoying prerecorded pitches called robocalls that hawk everything
from lower credit card interest rates to new windows for your home.
Robert
Madison, 43, of Shawnee, Kan., says he gets automated calls almost
daily from "Ann, with credit services," offering to lower his interest
rates.
"I am completely fed up," Madison said
in an interview. "I've repeatedly asked them to take me off their call
list." When he challenges their right to call, the solicitors become
combative, he said. "There's just nothing that they won't do."
Madison,
who works for a software company, says his phone number has been on the
do-not-call list for years. Since he hasn't made any progress getting
"Ann" to stop calling, Madison has started to file complaints about her
to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the list.
Amid
fanfare from consumer advocates, the federal do-not-call list was put
in place nearly a decade ago as a tool to limit telemarketing sales
calls to people who didn't want to be bothered. The registry has more
than 209 million phone numbers on it. That's a significant chunk of the
country, considering that there are about 84 million residential
customers with traditional landline phones and plenty more people with
cellphone numbers, which can also be placed on the list.
Telemarketers
are supposed to check the list every 31 days for numbers they can't
call. But some are calling anyway, and complaints about phone pitches
are climbing even as the number of telemarketers checking the registry
has dropped dramatically.
Government figures
show monthly robocall complaints have climbed from about 65,000 in
October 2010 to more than 212,000 this April. More general complaints
from people asking a telemarketer to stop calling them also rose during
that period, from about 71,000 to 182,000.
At
the same time, fewer telemarketers are checking the FTC list to see
which numbers are off limits. In 2007, more than 65,000 telemarketers
checked the list. Last year, only about 34,000 did so.
Despite those numbers, the FTC says the registry is doing an effective job fighting unwanted sales calls.
"It's
absolutely working," Lois Greisman, associate director of the agency's
marketing practices division, said in an interview with The Associated
Press. But, she said, "the proliferation of robocalls creates a
challenge for us."
Greisman said prerecorded
messages weren't used as a major marketing tool in 2003, when the
registry began. "In part because of technology and in part because of
greater competitiveness in the marketplace, they have become the
marketing vehicle of choice for fraudsters," she said.
For people trying to scam people out of their money, it's an attractive option. Robocalls are hard to trace and cheap to make.
With
an autodialer, millions of calls can be blasted out in a matter of
hours, bombarding people in a struggling economy with promises of debt
assistance and cheap loans. Even if a consumer does not have a phone
number on the do-not-call list, robocalls are illegal. A 2009 rule
specifically banned this type of phone sales pitch unless a consumer has
given written permission to a company to call.
Political
robocalls and automated calls from charities, or informational
robocalls, such as an airline calling about a flight delay, are exempt
from the ban. But those exemptions are being abused, too, with consumers
complaining of getting calls that begin as a legitimate call, say from a
charity or survey, but then eventually switch to an illegal
telemarketing sales pitch.
Robocalls can be
highly annoying to consumers because they're hard to stop. Fraudsters
use caller-ID spoofing so that when a person tries to call back the
robocaller, they get a disconnected number or something other than the
source of the original call.
The best thing
people can do when they get an illegal robocall is to hang up. Do not
press "1'' to speak to a live operator to get off the call list. If you
do, the FTC says, it will probably just lead to more robocalls. The
caller will know you're there and willing to answer, and may continue to
call.
The FTC says people can also contact
their phone providers to ask them to block the number. But be sure to
ask whether they charge for that. Telemarketers change caller-ID
information often, so it might not be worth paying a fee to block a
number that will soon change.
The industry says most legitimate telemarketers don't utilize robocalls to generate sales.
"They
give a bad name to telemarketers and hurt everybody," says Jerry
Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs at Direct
Marketing Association, a trade group.
Cerasale
says the do-not-call list has resulted in telemarketers making far
fewer cold calls to random people. Instead, he says, marketers have
shifted to other methods of reaching people, such as mail, email or
targeted advertisements on websites. That, he said, could be one of the
reasons that the number of telemarketers checking the registry has
dropped so sharply.
In light of the increased
complaints, the FTC is stepping up efforts to combat robocalls. It
recently released two consumer videos to explain what robocalls are and
what to do about them. It also announced an October summit to examine
the problem and explore the possibility of emerging technology that
might help trace robocalls and prevent scammers from spoofing their
caller ID.
Enforcement is another tool. The
FTC has brought cases against about a dozen companies since 2009,
including Talbots, DirecTV and Dish Network. The cases have yielded $5.6
million in penalties.
The agency said this
month that it was mailing refund checks to more than 4,000 consumers
nationwide who were caught up in a scam where the telemarketer used
robocalls from names like "Heather from card services" to pitch
worthless credit card rate reduction programs for an up-front fee.
Checks to consumers range from $31 to $1,300 depending on how much was
lost.
To file a complaint with the FTC, people
can go online to www.ftc.gov or call 888-382-1222 to report their
experience for possible enforcement. To register for the National Do Not Call Registry, click here.
Associated Press