Australian Do Not Call Register 252
green-e writes "Looks like us Aussies are finally introducing a national 'Do Not Call' register. Under the plan all telemarketers would be banned from calling homes after 8pm on weekdays and 5pm on weekends. Companies that call a household on the register could face fines of up to $220,000 (AU), which could be legislated early next year. About time something like this should be set up. How effective has it been in the US ?"
How effective has it been in the US ? (Score:5, Informative)
It has been pretty effective. Telemarketing calls were coming in hot and heavy right up to the last day, then stopped completely the day the ban went into effect. (Our ban is complete, not just an after-hours ban, as long as there is no business ralationship with the caller.) But since then a few telemarketers have figured thay can get away with breaking the law as long as they keep a low profile. I now get perhaps a call a month that is in clear violation of the law. I report these to my state's Atournet General office, but I've never heard of anything being done about them and over all we have only heard of one or two sucessful prosecutions they have done against anyone breaking this law. So it has helped a lot, but it's not perfect and I would like to see even more teeth in it.
In Sweden (Score:4, Informative)
I think it works pretty well but not 100%. It's really easy to sign up, just call a number, enter your home phone number and confirm.
Works in the UK too (Score:5, Informative)
I stayed off the do not call list in the UK ("telephone preference service") for a while, used to average one call per day. Im not getting any since joining, though it took a month or two to settle down.
Like the US, it's a complete ban unless they already have a business relationship with you.
Re:the UK needs this badly. (Score:3, Informative)
Already got it! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Telemarketers? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exceptions (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA: Market research companies, pollsters, charities and religious organisations are likely to be exempted.
Market research companies and charities would have to be the worst offenders of the lot. If they are exempted the government may as well not bother.
Re:$220000? (Score:5, Informative)
The theory is that Parliament just sets a penalty for each statutory contravention in Penalty Units according to its perceived seriousness, and can update them all automatically eg to account for inflation by amending a single section of a single piece of legislation (the Crimes Act) rather than every section imposing a penalty (which would be a nightmare). It's quite elegant for the legal profession.
It's likely that there will be a maximum penalty of 2000 Penalty Units for the contravention, which today = $220k, and in future may rise.
What's interesting is that some Acts I have dealt impose penalties in the range of 1 to 30 Penalty Units, so this is quite a big fine, relatively speaking. disclaimer - i'm a lawyer but i'm not your lawyer and this is not legal advice. don't rely on it!
Re:Only not after 8pm? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:US telemarkets UK (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting ... (Score:3, Informative)
My wife works from home, and she gets a lot of these calls during the day. I suppose the point is that large companies only have the reception desk listed in the book, so they get the junk calls. Small businesses get the full brunt of it.
Perhaps it is worse to get these calls at night, but it is pretty bad getting them during the day.
ironic that the US flag is under the Slashdot whilst talking about Australia.Perhaps they should have an Australia icon under the politics category.
how to avoid *all* telemarketers (Score:5, Informative)
I learned the technique from a colleague familiar with the industry. First, know your legal rights. Second, keep a hand-written log of occasions when you have asked to be added to the no-call list of a telemarketing firm. Be careful to have them spell out the name of the firm and the city they operate out of. Then wait for them to make a mistake. If they call you again, after the six month grace period the law allows them to update their paperwork, you've got it made.
Don't shout or be nasty; just read them the log and indicate that you are aware of your legal rights and are interested in collecting the statutory damages. They asked me to "please call this special number to be removed
Enjoy.
Good news for telemarketing firms (Score:2, Informative)
We have to factor a dead call rate into our lists, and from that we can calculate fairly accurately how many sales we'll make for each area we target. If we can remove the people who will not buy from us off our list it means we save the flagfall for a phone call and also the postage for our mailouts. If you use a standard postage and ff cost per person it comes in at around 70 cents. When you mail out to 8,000 people a day it adds up very quickly. Plus you have to cost in hourly rate for a telemarketer and mailroom person.
Right now, we have an internal do not call list which we value very highly. If we lost that list we would waste thousands every week on phone calls alone.
One thing we do get is a discount from our list providers when we feed information back to them every month. We send back address changes, primary contact number chages, head of household, primary cheque signer and rough income per household. Presently they do not request do not contacts from their list consumers, I would imagine when we receive the list from the ADMA we'll start feeding them back again.
700 000 employees (Score:2, Informative)
The easy way (Score:2, Informative)
Why? We've got an unlisted phone number. By paying Telstra whatever it is for the privilege of not having our number in the phone book (go figure) we don't appear in any telemarketers databases, so no annoying phone calls.
Of course we still get calls at work. We've just set up a special asterisk extension which plays some lovely "hold music" from artists such as Hanson until they hang up. "Can you hold please? I'll just put you on to the person who handles purchasing."