Hanging Up on Telemarketers
By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2003-06-30 11:50:06
Life could become a lot tougher for telemarketers and much easier for people fed up with nuisance phone calls by year's end.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has proposed rules—which could be adopted by the end of the year—that would create a national do-not-call registry and make it illegal for telemarketers to call anyone on the list.
A national registry would significantly expand the number of Americans already protected from unwanted calls because they signed up on no-call lists set up by states.
So far at least 31 states have enacted laws to curb unsolicited calls. A state's laws apply to all telemarketing calls, no matter where they originate, made to residents. Federal rules would apply only to interstate calls, but those account for the majority of telemarketing calls.
Since the FTC rules were proposed earlier this year, more than 43,000 responses—most favoring a national registry—have appeared on the FTC's website. "The largest single body of comment said 'Do it, and do it now,' " says Allen Hile, assistant director of FTC's Division of Marketing Practices.
Typical is a message from Gilbert Garcia who wrote, "This is a national harassment, and it must be stopped."
While current federal rules have curtailed some telemarketing practices, computer technology has allowed others to pop up.
According to FTC officials, one major theme in public comments on the proposed new rule is the practice of "predictive dialing," in which a computer dials number after number with the expectation that in a certain percentage of cases a telemarketer will be available when a consumer answers the phone.
Visit the Federal Trade Commission's website for more information on the proposed rules. Or call toll free (877) 382-4357.
In many cases, however, the consumer answers the phone and hears either dead air or a hang-up click. While such calls are maddening to everybody, they can be particularly frightening to older people, who are less likely to screen calls with answering machines, less likely to have caller ID, have more trouble getting to the phone, and are more alarmed by hang-up calls.
The new FTC rule will require predictive dialers (and all other telemarketers) to make their identities available on caller IDs.
In the meantime, the Direct Marketing Association has responded to consumer outrage by asking its member telemarketers to limit the percentage of abandoned calls they make in a day to 5 percent. DMA guidelines also ask that telemarketers "abandon" any one telephone number no more than twice in one month.
Consumer groups argue over how effective the guidelines have been, and the FTC is now considering whether to require lower abandonment rates. Two states, Kansas and California, have already passed legislation effectively outlawing predictive dialing to consumers in those states.
Consumers would sign up for the FTC list by calling an 800 number. The proposed rules would also:
- require telemarketers to provide their names and numbers so consumers with caller ID systems can identify them; and
- prohibit companies from buying and selling consumer billing information — such as credit card and bank account numbers — for telemarketing purposes. Companies could not use such information without a consumer's permission.
"Over and over we hear from consumers that they had no idea that money could be taken from their account without their providing an account number," AARP federal affairs director David Certner told the FTC.
AARP is among the groups that back the new FTC action as long as it doesn't override tougher state laws. That's unlikely to happen. "The federal government doesn't willy-nilly pre-empt state laws," the FTC's Hile says. "There's no way we would tell the states they could not enforce their own laws."
Linda Greider is a freelance writer in Washington, DC.
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