Would you buy DSL service from a company that either doesn’t care about Do Not Call lists or doesn’t know how they work? A man in Missouri was harassed to the point where he considered calling the police, because no matter what he did, AT&T wouldn’t stop calling. Every time he tried contacting AT&T to get it to stop, he ended up in automated phone systems with recorded messages, busy signals, and disconnections—but never a live person. Only after he wrote to a local consumer advocacy columnist did AT&T pay attention and turn off the telemarketing fire hose. AT&T didn’t, however, explain why they were targeting this person, or whether anyone else is facing the same barrage of calls.
Remember to sign up with the National Do Not Call Registry if you haven’t already. They’ll block up to three phone numbers for you, including cellular numbers. But don’t expect the Do Not Call registry to catch all telephone spam:
Because of limitations in the jurisdiction of the FTC and FCC, calls from or on behalf of political organizations, charities, and telephone surveyors would still be permitted, as would calls from companies with which you have an existing business relationship, or those to whom you’ve provided express agreement in writing to receive their calls.
You should also be aware that there are two easy ways for companies to get around the registry:
- If you buy something from a company, they can contact you for 18 months after the transaction unless you explicitly tell them not to—and if you tell them not to, they have to comply or face a fine of up to $11,000.
- If you simply make an inquiry or submit an application to a company, they can contact you for 3 months after the initial contact (again, unless you explicitly tell them not to).
So what happens if you’ve told a company not to call and they do anyway? If you’ve been on the Do Not Call registry for at least 31 days, visit their website to file a complaint. If you’re not in the registry but you asked the company not to call you and they did anyway, check out the FTC Complaint Assistant, which will ask you a series of questions and eventually help you submit a telemarketing-related complaint.
“When AT&T won’t stop calling” [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
(Photo: Getty)
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@Crim Law Geek:
My city is doing this now, also. I find it incredibly hard to call 911 unless someone is dying. And now we are hearing about how the 911 system is getting frivolous crap, like “Sonic put mayo on my burger when I asked for mustard!”
@HogwartsAlum: It should be made a law, if someone calls 911 for the weather or something absurd like the Sonic example, you should be institutionalized, because, obviously you have some sort of mental deficiency, and in your own myopic worldview those qualify as emergencies.
@RabbitDinner:
In the Ninth Circuit, there was recently a case of a guy crossing the border who flashed a badge and said he was a member of the “Homeland Security Special Response Team” (or something like that), an agency that did not exist. He was busted for impersonating a federal officer (forgot what the exact charge was). The court’s thinking was something along the line of “most people don’t know the names of most law enforcement agencies, so they could think you are a federal agent even if you mention an agency that doesn’t exist”.
INAL (yet), YMMV, I am not responsible if you end up in PMITA, etc, etc
@RabbitDinner:
I agree with you, but what to do if the police TELL you to call it when you call them?
Something is very wrong here.
Or, you could wait until the caller says why he/she is calling (a great offer or whatever) and tell them you’re not interested. You don’t want it. You don’t need it. Thank you. And then hang up. There’s no need for rudeness. This way, everyone is civil and the caller did his/her job and you have successfully fended off another telemarketer.
I don’t even have to answer the phone–with caller ID, I usually know who is calling.
Quite honestly? I’m not at all surprised. AT&T is really the only service of choice in my area. For about 3 weeks, we’d get calls up to 4 times a day for us to sign up with U-Verse. The only problem is that we weren’t interested because we didn’t have the $200 or more to cancel our contract with DirecTV. Hubby and I told the reps that every time. It got to the point that we finally had to use the call blocking feature on our phone just to get them to stop.
However, they’d be back within the next day or so on another number. I finally had to call the customer service number and demand not a supervisor but the call center manager to get the calls to stop.
If the customer says no, then they mean no!
I used to work for a 3rd party company that would make calls “on behalf of AT&T”.
Their whole out look on things as far as the DNC list is that it may as well not exist. We were trained to read a disclosure about the DNC registry, act like we were removing their number from our dialer list, and in all actuality, do nothing.
Also, another thing that we were trained to do was that if someone said “Take me off your list” and you DID NOT read the disclosure, we were not allowed to take their number off the calling list, and would be wrote up if we did not read the disclosure and still removed their number.
And in the disclosure we had to read, it stated something like, it would remove their number from OUR calling list immediately, however it could take anywhere from 30-60 days for their request to be removed from all calling lists company wide. It was crap in my opinion.
Could explain why I was only at that company for a month.