Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with telemarketers

Do not give list?

jeffburdges — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 07:58:58 -0800

Does anyone maintain a "Do not give list"? By this, I mean a list of charities that engage in telephone telemarketing, and hence to whom one should avoid giving donations. It'd also be nice to know about excessive junk mail and spam, but those are less invasive.

Charity Navigator takes privacy policies into account, but this seems rather weak. Why not target the charities doing the asking? (See also NYT & MSN)

Telemarketers are Big Fat Liars!!!!

genniangel0 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:34:36 -0800

How can I get rid of Telemarketers that call and falsely say they know my boss? I am the personal assistant to an engineer. Unfortunately, my boss gets a lot of unwanted sales calls and it is part of my job to keep them from getting to him! My problem is that they will call pretending to know him or telling me that they know him... Now..as you can see...this is a problem for me and for my boss. I guess I just don't know the proper questions to ask. I ask them what their name is and the purpose of their call. They usually tell me that they will call back when he is available. I ask if i can tell him who called and they say some off the wall name, and i ask for the purpose of the call and they say that they will call back. WE DON'T WANT THEM TO CALL BACK!!!

I had one guy today who was a total jerk. I asked how he knew my boss...he said "Well how do you know him!" of course i told him that I was his assistant, to which he replied...."you haven't been his assistant his whole life have you?" I hung up on him.

I just don't know what to say to them to get them to understand that we don't want their calls and being sneaky about it telling me that they know him is retarded. Like I'm not going to ask! They usually hang up in my face if I tell them that he isn't in the office which is so rude....and then of course I don't have time to tell them to take us off their calling list.

How can I take down these telemarketers?

anodyne- — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:53:18 -0800

Please help me take action against an unidentified automated telemarketer! Over the last three weeks I have received three identical automated calls on my home phone number soliciting a "free carpet cleaning" service. The company and phone number are never identified, and the only options on the phone tree are:
1) Make an "appointment"
2) unsubscribe from list.

*69 only gives me "000-000-0000," so I can't call them back and ask for information.

I would love to send a complaint to the FCC/FTC/whoever, but I don't know if this will do any good without as much as a phone number.

I'm sure this is illegal (I believe I can take them to small-claims court for $500 for the automated solicitations), but I don't know to what degree or to whom I should complain. Any ideas on what, if any, action I can take? Thanks.

Why were our numbers removed from the Do Not Call list?

litlnemo — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:33:59 -0800

Why were all of our household's phone numbers -- through separate phone companies -- recently removed from the (US) National Do Not Call list? The reasons given on the website don't seem to apply. Today I received an annoying telemarketer call. I went to https://www.donotcall.gov/ to report it as a Do Not Call violation, as I occasionally do when this happens. (We've been on the list at this number since day one, and our other numbers have been on the list for some time as well.)

I was surprised to see that all of our household's numbers, both landline and cell, were no longer on the DNC list. (Which explains the uptick in telespam we've noticed recently. Until then, the DNC list had worked really well for us.) According to the DNC site, the ways one might be removed are as follows:

Call from the listed number and ask to be removed

Your phone number is disconnected, then reconnected

You change calling plans (!) or other services

You change the billing name on the account

Also, after 5 years your registration expires -- but the list hasn't even been up for 5 years yet, so this isn't the issue.

We haven't done any of these things. And what's stranger is that our cell phones and landline are not through the same company, so even if the company had done something to cause this, it wouldn't be likely to happen to all the phones.

Is it possible that telespammers have figured out some sneaky way to remove people from the DNC list? Has this happened to others, and do you have any ideas why all of our numbers might have been knocked off the list like this, since the reasons given at the donotcall.gov site don't seem to apply? Was there a massive data loss in the DNC database?

I've re-added all the numbers, but it's quite annoying, and it is 31 days until you can start reporting violations again.

How can I teach my husband to be a man to the telemarketers?

jesirose — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:14:59 -0800

How can I teach my husband to be a man to the telemarketers? We're on the do not call list, but telemarketers occasionally call our apartment and my husband's phone. When our home phone rings I always answer, and as soon as I know it's a telemarketer, I say "No thanks, bye" and hang up, even if they keep talking.

When they call HIS phone, he will listen to them, do the surveys, do whatever they want. He'll say he's not interested, but he keeps talking to them.

I just listened to him tell one he wasn't interested about ten times straight before I yelled for him to hang up. (I think they heard me, because they hung up on him.) The closest he's got to hanging up on one is telling them the phone was dying. They called back later, and I had to take the phone and tell them to fuck off, and hang it up. It annoys me to listen to him say "I'm not interested" over and over.

I don't think he gets that they're not going to stop at "I'm not interested."

I know I'm not that bad of a conversationalist that he needs to resort to talking to these people. How do I get him to stop wasting his time, and hang up the phone?