David

Stop Telemarketers

Lets go over how to block telemarketers, and it doesn’t matter if they are cell phone telemarketers or if they are landline telemarketers. At the moment VoIP telemarketers are exempt from laws that regulate phone usage, and I will cover that in another article.

Step one… Get off the list!
The first thing you will want to do is get off the list. This in itself is a multi-step process, but I will try to remember the acronym KISS (keep it simple stupid). So if after reading this, if it is not simple please feel free to tell me where I got stupid.

Who makes the list? Simply put, the people in charge of the credit system make the list. Second in line are the companies that facilitate the credit system add to and redistribute the list. Third in line are the people you would think should be first: the phone companies. Following the phone companies are the people who scan the directories (phone book or online phone book) for the sole purpose of making lists to sell.

What you need to do! The first thing you need to do is write the people who make the list, and tell them you don’t want to be part of it. The first companies to contact are listed below, and are also responsible for most of the junk mail you receive.

Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 282
Carmel, NY 10512-0282

Trans Union LLC
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 505
Woodlyn, PA 19094-0505

Experian Consumer Services
901 W. Bond Street
Lincoln, NE 68521-3694

Equifax Inc.
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241

Next on the list is a company call Dun and Bradstreet: http://www.dnb.com. Although they are informative and provide a real service, they make lots of money informing others about your business (and not in a good way). Dun and Bradstreet inform telemarketing companies about your business, and not your potential customers. Even if your customers are telemarketers, please remember that they will be calling trying to sell you stuff and not the other way around.

The D&B Corporation
103 JFK Parkway
Short Hills, NJ 07078

Or

D and B Customer Service email

And don’t forget to write the D&B transfer agent

EquiServe Trust Company, N.A.
P.O. Box 43023
Providence, RI 02940-3023

Telephone: 800.519.3111 (within the U.S.)
Telephone: 816.843.4299 (outside of the U.S.)
Hearing Impaired: 781.575.2692
Fax: 781.828.8813
www.equiserve.com

Your letter of “name removal” should be short and simple. Example:

Dear (Company Name),

Please remove my name, address, phone number, and any other information you have from your direct marketing program or similar program. From this day forward (insert date), you are hereby notified that you are unauthorized to sell / disclose any information you have collected about me for any reason without my prior written consent. Written consent must be given by me for each party you wish to disclose my information to, and allows for only a single use of my information unless otherwise specified. Furthermore if you do not have direct business with my affairs, or me you are under explicit instruction to delete / remove all record of my existence from all of your systems.

The example letter above is a good one because it defines very clearly your intentions. I strongly urge you to use the written consent part of the letter even if you just want them to delete you, because if their lawyers find a loophole for your situation they will only be able to use it once. For a technical example finish this paragraph, or skip to the next paragraph if you don’t care about why. In contract law there is something known as a “continuing waiver,” and if you allow this company to use your information anytime after you wrote your letter of name removal, then they can continue to use to use your information again until you ask them to stop again.

Step two… your recourse for the companies who ignore you.
If a company continues to ignore you, don’t worry you have options. Your best option is to sue, and before you stop reading, hear me out. We are not talking “Sue” as in the lawyers, money and lost time type of sue… we are talking about a simple “small claims court” action that will cost you about $100 and a few hours of time. What you will get however is a lot more… Per the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (signed into law by daddy George Bush) you have something called the “private right of action.” There is a lot to this action if you are interested, but the bottom line of what most of you will probably care about is: Your small claims action is worth about $500 per violation, and $500 if they fail to provide you with a copy of their firm’s “Do Not Call Policy.”

Click here to read the testimonial of André-Tascha Lammé in the words of Bob Sullivan

Making Telemarketers pay — In Cash
Posted: Tuesday, February 13 at 04:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/02/suing_telemarke.html

When André-Tascha Lammé was granted a judgment of $3,500 last month in a Sacramento, Calif., small claims court, he heard gasps.

“You could hear people in the courtroom saying, ‘You can sue telemarketers?’” he said. You can. In fact, you can make some decent cash for your trouble.

Lammé started getting pelted with calls from mortgage brokers last year, just as his adjustable rate mortgage was about to reset. Like many consumers, he quickly reached the boiling point over the frequent interruptions. But unlike many consumers, the computer programmer took the time to educate himself – perhaps owing to the spirit of his grandmother, a lawyer for several decades – and quickly discovered the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

“It specifically deals with unwanted calls,” he said. “For each violation, there is a $500 penalty.” Who gets that money? The call recipient. Lammé read on and found he didn’t have to hire a high-priced attorney to pursue the penalty fees – he could file the case himself.

So far, Lammé has won $6,000 in judgments against telemarketers in three cases. He’s not a lawyer, but by filing in small claims court, he’s spent no more than $100 in court fees and scarcely more than an hour of his time on any case. Now he wants you to do it, too.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, signed into law by George Bush the elder, led to creation of the ragingly popular Do Not Call List. But tucked away in the bill was another important provision that entitles consumers to take what’s called a “private right of action.” For each violation of the act, consumers can sue for a $500 penalty. Violations include calling after a consumer has told a company to stop, or failing to provide the consumer with a copy of the firm’s Do Not Call policy.

In his most recent case, heard in January in Sacramento, Lammé was awarded $3,500 for seven violations allegedly committed by Country Club Mortgage Inc. of Visalia. David Mitchell, vice president of Country Club Mortgage, said he couldn’t comment on the litigation.

Suing a telemarketing firm might sound like a paperwork headache beyond the means of most people, but it’s not, said Lammé. Small claims court papers are easy to file, he said. In Sacramento County, he doesn’t even have to walk down to the courthouse. He can file online.

“It only took me five or 10 minutes to file,” he said. “No more than a half-hour total.”

In two prior cases, Lammé didn’t even have to go to court. Two other companies settled with him for about $2,500 after he filed his case.

Web-filing streamlines the process
Suing telemarketers is not new, but Web-based court forms have made it much easier. Electronic filing is slowly becoming standard at small claims courts across the country, said Emily Doskow, editor of “Everybody’s Guide to Small Claims Court.”

“It’s very consumer friendly,” she said. “It’s been growing in popularity for the last five years.”

Despite Lammé’s success, Davids don’t typically triumph over Goliaths in the venue, said Stuart Rossman, director of litigation at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.

Consumers who pursue a small claims case after frustrating fights with their cable provider, cell phone company or a retail electronics store are in for a rude awakening, he said. In almost all those situations, they long ago waived their right to sue by agreeing to mandatory binding arbitration for disputes.

Don’t remember doing that? Well, you did, virtually any time you signed a contract with a service provider, used your credit card or even opened a shrink-wrapped piece of software you purchased at an electronics store. Binding arbitration agreements are everywhere, and they virtually eliminate a consumers’ ability to bring small claims court cases.

“Courts will say, ‘You have agreed to arbitration, we can’t get involved,’” said attorney Ed Rapacki, who is challenging arbitration clauses in several cases around the country. “At small claims, (the defendant) will file a motion to dismiss or to compel arbitration. They’ll say, ‘Here’s the contract, here’s the arbitration clause.’ And the judge will order you to proceed to arbitration.”

The legal basis for mandatory arbitration dates all he way back to the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925, which was designed to allow two parties to streamline court proceedings.

But Rossman said arbitration has turned into a one-sided arrangement that nearly always favors the corporation and forces consumers to unknowingly surrender their rights to use the traditional court system.

“There are a number of things that organizations like banks are doing to protect themselves in those (contracts),” he said. “Mandatory arbitration prevents individuals from bringing claims … and they are difficult to defeat.”

An organization named StopBMA (binding mandatatory arbitration) has been trying to call attention to the issue of arbitration agreements. More information is available at GiveMeBackMyRights.org.

Lammé is a lucky litigant for two reasons: Congress made it clear that penalties awarded under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act should go to consumers, and he is suing companies with which he has no contractual relationship, and therefore can’t have signed arbitration agreements.

How to file

If you are interested in pursuing a small claims case against a telemarketer, Lammé has set up a Web site with instructions at KillTheCalls.com. It includes a handy list of links to various small claims court instruction pages all around the Internet.

In most cases, your small claims court will be located at the county courthouse in the same building as your superior court.

The real trick to successful small claims cases is adequately serving the defendant with a summons indicating they’ve been sued and must appear in court. That means you’ll have to provide the court with a viable address and preferably the name of a corporate executive or officer. That’s sometimes easier said than done, but often you can find the information on the state Secretary of State’s Web site.

On court day, it’s important to bring supporting paperwork organized in an easy-to-read format. Lammé always brings a copy of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to hand to the judge. The trials are informal, so you won’t need to learn any legal jargon to plead your case. You might feel nervous or intimidated, but acting as your own lawyer is not as hard as it seems, Lammé said. He recommends going to court a day or two before your case just to become familiar with the courtroom procedures.

“Small claims judges are … sympathetic,” to the legally uninitiated, he said. “The judges give the benefit of the plaintiffs.”

You only get one shot to make your case. By filing in small claims as a plaintiff, you waive your right to appeal the verdict or file in any other court.

One other bit of bad news: If you win a judgment, you will likely have a tough time collecting, particularly if your defendant resides in another state. You’ll no doubt have to pay additional court fees in an attempt to collect. But you will have time on your side — in New York and Massachusetts, for example, you have 20 years.

Because Lammé has sued firms that can’t disappear overnight, he has been able to collect on his lawsuits. But he’s not in it for the money, he said. He thinks consumers’ lawsuits are the best way to end unwanted phone calls.

“If you sue these people, they’re going to get the message,” he said.

In light of this report by Ben Charney of CNET News.com I will be publishing tips on how to prevent junk calls soon.

Net phone customers brace for ‘VoIP spam’
By Ben Charny, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: August 10, 2004, 4:00 AM PT

ZDNet Tags: VoIP and IP telephony,
Spam and phishing,
Bellsouth Corp
At&t
Verizon Communications Inc
Verisign Inc

If you’re sick of spam, imagine wading through dozens of prerecorded porn and Viagra messages on your voice mail.

Some computer security and privacy experts are warning that such a day may not be far off for customers of new Internet phone services, which marry the immediacy of a voice call with the conveniences–and inconveniences–of e-mail.

That could be unwelcome news for those who believe telemarketing is already so bad it can’t possibly get any worse.

“The fear with VoIP spam is you will have an Internet address for your phone number, which means you can use the same tools you use for e-mail to generate traffic, said Tom Kershaw, a vice president at security specialist VeriSign. “That raises automation to scary degrees.”

So-called voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services have begun winning converts thanks to cheap rates and a slew of features that traditional phone companies can’t match. But consumers who adopt the technology could pay a steep price if “VoIP spam” takes hold.

There are now only about 600,000 commercial Net phone subscribers, a market too small for the attention of big telemarketers. But the VoIP market is growing fast. Technology research firm IDC predicts VoIP revenue will grow from $3.3 billion in 2003 to $15.1 billion by 2007.

Once the numbers begin to add up, it’s all but inevitable that new marketing techniques will spring up to take advantage of VoIP’s strengths.

Like e-mail, VoIP calls find their way by locating an IP (Internet Protocol) address, a unique set of numbers assigned to each device connected to the Web. By contrast, calls made over the traditional phone network are routed by instructions taken from a 10-digit telephone number. Using VoIP, telemarketers can send messages to thousands of addresses at a time, rather than tying up a single phone line to make one call.

The biggest likely impact of VoIP spam will be on voice mail boxes. They’ll dutifully record every message they receive, while a human answering the phone will likely hang up within a few seconds. That could have a tremendous effect on VoIP providers that offer free voice mail; they would have to expand their storage capabilities to handle the additional spam messages.

Consider software from Frederick, Mass.-based Qovia, which seeks out the IP addresses assigned to phones, then sends each a 30-second recording. Its pace–1,000 synthetic calls every five seconds–is a quantum leap from the automated “Demon Box” dialers that telemarketers use now.

Qovia Chief Technology Officer Choon Shim said the company didn’t create its VoIP spam generator to send “30-second calls about Viagra to millions of phones.” Rather, it was to serve as a wake-up call of what could be a devastating problem for the growing Net phone industry, Shim said.

Aside from the pride of proving a concept, there are some benefits to generating so many messages. There has been interest from government agencies, Shim said, which have begun exploring how to use the VoIP spam generator to replace emergency broadcasts over television and radio. Information technology managers at companies wrestling with a large number of mobile workers could use VoIP spam to better manage the devices.

“We are not about selling tools to telemarketers,” Shim said. “But these things are very easy to write, as we’ve shown in our labs. We can’t stop other people from creating their own tools.”

A trickle for now
So far, there have only been isolated cases of spam to homes, and only one known example of a corporate VoIP network spammed so heavily it was paralyzed, according to a handful of carriers surveyed this week.

“There are just so few customers in relation to what’s available over landlines, that there’s really no reason for telemarketers to even begin to think about it,” said Gary Morgenstern, a spokesman for VoIP dealer AT&T.

Still, the issue appears to be gaining attention in some influential circles. The nation’s two largest long-distance companies, AT&T and MCI, say the VoIP spam issue is on their agenda. And about six weeks ago, the United States Telephone Association (USTA) identified VoIP spam as one of the next major headaches, from a regulatory and day-to-day operations perspective.

“This threatens to be a big problem in the future,” a USTA representative said.

Notably, telemarketers that use VoIP to target Net phone customers may not be required to comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s recently created Do-Not-Call list, computer security and privacy experts said, citing uncertainty over its status.

“VoIP spam fits very nicely into yet another void in existing regulation,” said Ray Everett-Church, a principal with privacy consultants ePrivacy Group in Philadelphia.

Commercial VoIP carriers say they are working to protect their customers. For example, Vonage, the largest residential VoIP services provider with some 200,000 subscribers, said it assigns phone numbers along with IP addresses, making it more difficult for spammers to generate hundreds of calls per minute, according to a company representative.

An MCI spokeswoman said VoIP spam is “not an issue on the network because we are engineering a solution to prevent it.” She said the company knows of no incidents to date of VoIP spam on the MCI network.

The problem is still so new that it has largely gone unnoticed, Everett-Church said.

One of the first Net phone spams didn’t cause much of a stir, he recalled. The recipients thought the pre-recorded telemarketing call they received was a harmless error on the part of the phone company.

But when people with two Net phone lines, assigned sequential telephone numbers, got the same pre-recorded call within seconds of each other, “it was very clear to them that their phone was being spammed,” he concluded.

The best way to stop junk mail is to get oneself removed from the list, and to do that it helps to know who is making the lists.

The people in charge of credit reporting decided that because they have access to privileged information, and information is valuable, that they should just start selling your information. The worst part is, most people who try hard to keep themselves below the radar need the credit reporting agencies because of the lifestyles they live. Furthermore most people who are hard to track get calls frequently from these companies to make sure their records are “up to date.” Next (and this part is truly underhanded) the credit reporting agencies are exempt from the national do not call list so they can and will call you. Not to mention most people trust them anyway.

So the bottom line is: The companies most trusted with your private information, sell everything but your social security number. Below is how to get off their list.

This is the Postal Service Statement:

Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 282
Carmel, NY 10512-0282

Trans Union LLC
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 505
Woodlyn, PA 19094-0505

Experian Consumer Services
901 W. Bond Street
Lincoln, NE 68521-3694

Equifax Inc.
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241

Up to 90 percent of mailing lists are accessed by this process. Registrants generally note a decrease of unsolicited mail one to three months after their names are listed. Since some customers may receive mail under various names, include alternative names or spellings to ensure that the advertiser’s mail is stopped.

In summary, by law we must deliver ALL mail that has been paid for - including your private personal mail and that of businesses and organizations.

My favorite way to fight junk mail is what is known as “Junk Mail Guerilla Warfare” is used to fight companies who send junk mail with prepaid return envelopes. This method is effective against all but the most tenacious and/or disorganized companies.

What you need to do:
When you get junk mail with a prepaid return envelope, you need to take the company’s own documentation and return it to them. As long as the company is not extremely hell-bent on sending direct mail they will usually cut you from the mailing list in a few months because you are wasting their money. How are you wasting their money? When it comes to prepaid return envelopes, the company only pays for the return postage if you send the prepaid envelope back to them. Also note, it helps if you write on the return contents “Remove from list.”

Things You Should Know
Ok we already established that if you send back the prepaid envelope, the company who sent you the junk now has to pay to receive the junk. However there are many details that play pretty big roles in this drama so be advised and read the following paragraphs.

Why the US Postal Service likes it
Junk mail and Junk Mail Guerilla Warfare are both supported by the US Postal Service because the post office makes money for the envelope going both ways, but in many cases the company spamming you has a deal with the post office. If the prepaid envelope comes back empty the company does not have to pay for your attempt at retaliation and many times the post office just throws it away. So make sure to put something in the return envelope. If you can make the envelope heavier than one ounce, the post office will charge your spammer even more, but for those who believe in GREEN, please remember that if the envelope is heavy you are making the post office spend more fuel on transporting your envelope. The most environmentally sound impact you can make is by including only one light item to return to the spamming company. Remember that your envelope might feel light in your hand, but lift a 200 page stack of paper to remind yourself that paper is heavy.

Environmental Impact
Basically direct mail spam is bad for everything when it comes to the larger picture, and if you’re truly a person who believes in the environment don’t use spam guerilla warfare. Petroleum fuel is being spent to get the letter to you, and fuel is spent to return the envelope. Paper is what the spam and the envelope are both made of, and the sources of paper are usually whatever is cheapest (recycled paper is more expensive) so they will be cutting fresh trees. On the other hand the post office employs thousands of people just to deal with the junk mail. U.S. companies alone mailed out more than 100 billion pieces of junk mail last year. The heft was almost 2 billion pounds of mail that earned the US Postal service almost 20 billion dollars.

Economic Impact
So what happens if we stop junk mail on a wide scale? We use less fuel, we use less paper, less ink, and the US Postal Service and the companies spamming you employ less people. Also the paper mills produce less meaning they employ less, and the same goes for the ink producers and the graphic artists who designed that junk. So what do we do about all these people who will need jobs elsewhere? I personally don’t know, and am looking for a plan.