Fighting the tide of telemarketing
Adam Turner gives his tips for stopping telemarketers that don't abide by Australia's Do Not Call Register.
It seems the telcos just won't leave us alone. Australians hate telemarketers, if the response to the Do Not Call Register is anything to go by. The site was swamped when first launched in 2007, as people scrambled to add their home phone number to the list of numbers telemarketers were forbidden to call.
Eighteen months later, there are around 2 million numbers registered - but it seems the ISPs and telcos themselves are the biggest offenders when it comes to calling us.
Just over half of such complaints received by the Australian Communications and Media Authority stem from unwanted calls promoting phone plans and other related services.
Over the past 12 months, ACMA has issued four infringement notices to telecommunications companies, including a $147,400 penalty paid by Dodo Australia in October 2008.
ACMA has accepted "enforceable undertakings" from Dodo Australia, Astron Communications and People Telecom. Formal warnings have also been issued to Global Telelinks, Ezycall and m8 Telecom.
In the last 12 months, I'd say the bulk of the telemarketing calls I've received are on behalf of Optus and Telstra, trying to get me to switch my phones around. The telemarketing barrage is getting so bad that I know people who just don't answer the phone between 6 and 8 in the evening.
It's so bad that, when I got a second phone line installed for work once, a telemarketer rang while the Telstra technician was still standing in the room!
I've found the best way to stop telemarketers is to trace them back to the source and nip it in the bud. Whenever I get a telemarketing call, I ask them where they got my number from and how I get myself removed from that list.
Before the Do Not Call Register was launched, I found quite a few traced back to the giant Acxiom database - controlled by one of the world's biggest direct marketing firms (and linked to the Packer family in Australia). You can ring 02 9032 3200 for "consumer opt-out requests", which seemed to significantly reduce the number of telemarketers who interrupted my dinner.
Of course these days marketing giants such as Acxiom are smart enough to abide by the Do Not Call Register. The cheeky sods have even found ways to make money from it, offering Do Not Call Register screening services to other companies along with in-house training on "privacy and direct marketing issues". Now that's what I call turning a problem into an opportunity.
Aside from the telcos, the few telemarketers that seem to sneak through these days are dodgy overseas call centres who refuse to identify themselves once I start asking questions.
There's one that tends to hang up on me whenever I ask to speak to a supervisor. I think the trick might be to string them on for a while so I can get more information and then report them to to ACMA.
What are your methods for dealing with unwanted marketing calls?
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