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FCC Considering Banning Transfer of Online Consent Forms
- golfinho23 4y agoLess harassment, I’m all for it
- bobthepanda 4y agoGood. Do this for political spam next.
- olliej 4y agoFor serious the last Election Day resulted in me getting a shit ton of BS text messages, all structurally the same, and all without any valid contact information.
- kibwen 4y agoI got daily spam texts from the republican party telling me how John Fetterman was going to doom Pennsylvania to communism. I live in Massachusetts, assholes!
- olliej 4y agoI got essentially the same thing for both parties - stylistically: identical hyperventilating, identical style, identical badly cropped photos, and url to a path inside an otherwise empty godaddy domain, redirecting to act blue fundraising in some cases similar republican ones in others. It was very clear that one organization was doing both sides
- rqtwteye 4y agoI responded to a Democrat text that I would never ever vote democrat again if this didn’t stop. It stopped.
- CamperBob2 4y agoKeeping in mind that "Joe jobs" are not exactly unheard-of in politics, of course.
- czx4f4bd 4y agoTIL https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/joe-job https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/joe-job
- bobmaxup 4y agoThis whole ecosystem is in the process of changing. Here is a tidbit of insight: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405850570267-Nonprofit-and-Government-Guide-to-A2P-10DLC-Text-Messaging https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405850570267-N...
- bobthepanda 4y agoHm. I’m skeptical that an industry-provided solution is going to solve spam; I’ll believe it when I see it.
- olliej 4y agoI am unclear what the complaint is here - it seems to be implying that the author thinks that me providing my contact details to one company _should_ be a valid reason that an unrelated company should be able to contact me, and that somehow a "lead generator" is anything other than that? I get that there are people who's business model is buying contact information and claiming the sellers of that information gained a blanket consent to spam that contact, but I don't know a single person - who doesn't make money from spamming people - who has ever wanted that. I also appreciate the euphemism of "lead generation" rather than spammer.
- chc 4y agoThe OP doesn't appear to be complaining. The conclusion of the article is basically that the field is full enough of bad actors to justify drastic action like this.
- nerdponx 4y agoThat's kind of missing the point. The article is up in arms that companies which only want to spam you with legitimate products (in a product category similar to whatever you signed up for) won't get to do so, because of those bad actors, the multi-vertical spammers and scammers. OP is complaining that the industry brought this upon themselves by failing to self-regulate and stop the bad actors in time to avert regulatory attention. The reality of course is that all text message spammers are bad actors, just less bad than the worst of the worst. It is probably is true that failure to self-regulate is what brought this down on the industry, but the industry as a whole deserves it and everyone will be happy to see it gone, except for the unscrupulous handful who make a profit off of it.
- throwaway81523 4y agoI think the author also wants to get the proposed regulation modified before it goes into force, to make it weaker. Of course I want the opposite: it should be made stronger rather than weaker.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI’m having a really hard time, feeling sorry for these folks. I get a ton of spam texts, every day. Not quite as bad as the spoofed robocalls, and a mere shadow of the email spam I get (which suddenly exploded, so I guess they figured out how to get past the low-level gatekeepers). The legit folks sell you to the non-legit folks, then say “I’m not responsible for what they do with it!”
- nerdponx 4y agoEven the "legit" text message spammers can get bent. This guy is acting like those poor little insurance companies don't have any other way to advertise to me, because they just want me to have better insurance, out of the goodness of their job-creating hearts.
- AbusiveHNAdmin 4y agoAT&T has to be among the worst. These jagoffs would send me no fewer then three texts at all hours of the day or night to simply tell me there was nothing with my account. No exaggeration: They would badger me repeatedly to say that my bill auto-pay had succeeded... and then that I could save $5 by signing up for auto-pay... and some other inexcusable nonsense. I logged every call I made to them, during many of which they swore they'd stop it. Eventually they started claiming that they couldn't. I had to block AT&T's number on my phone. How execrably stupid do they have to be to send "everything's fine" texts over and over and over instead of, at the very most, sending an E-MAIL?
- yxhuvud 4y agoIf the so called legit folks sell you, then they are not legit.
- arlcode 4y agoWhy does that mostly seem to be a problem in the US? I'm from a first world country in Europe and I can count the number of spam calls I got over the years on one hand (literally 2). Same goes for spam texts (3). For legal reasons my phone number could be found on the open web for years. With a fairly wealthy population (by world standard) and a language spoken by ~100 million people there should be ample opportunities to spam people. Yet even my parents whose number were listed in the phone book get maybe 1 or two spam calls per year
- kajic 4y agoThis is great! I’m looking forward to similar regulation for email spam.
- nulbyte 4y ago> We propose to ban the practice of obtaining a single consumer consent as grounds for delivering calls and text messages from multiple marketers... I honestly don't understand how this isn't already a thing. The bit about Lending Tree struck a chord with me. I tried it once. I expected offers on the screen. Instead, I immediately received text messages, emails, and phone calls from multiple lenders at the same time. I was furious at every one of them. > Caught in the middle are the innocent companies trying to sell their legitimate products to interested consumers. They want no part of fraudulent leads or fraudulent lawsuits. They’re just trying to help someone buy a home or get car insurance. No, not innocent. "Hey, I've got a get rich quick scheme! I'll give you leads for customers, but you have to call them fast before my other customers do!" Nothing innocent about that. You sign up for that, you know exactly what you are doing, and you know damn well it's wrong.
- Johnny555 4y agoAnd there’s a trivial solution for the lending tree scenario (I’m making a big leap of faith that consumers really want txt spam from a dozen different lenders) Instead of handing off customer contact info to a dozen different lenders, they can send the loan request to the lenders, and the lenders can send their offers back to lending tree who can then send it to the customer since the customer only authorized lending tree to contact them. Ideally lending tree would consolidate the responses so instead of a dozen txt messages, the customer receives a single one from lending tree.
- loopdoend 4y agoThis is already a thing in the leadgen space it's called RTB. Tree has likely simply figured out that it's more profitable to sell the data multiple times. Hot leads are very valuable, especially in the pay-per-call space. Every single one of those calls the GP is complaining about likely "reached duration" and paid out to Tree. Hehe.
- nickphx 4y agoSausage factory goes brrrrrrr
- naikrovek 4y agoI love how it's framed as destructive to the "lead generation industry". it is nuts how salespeople view themselves. they're the heroes who drive business, they're the backbone of the economy, etc. anyone negatively impacted by the banning of online consent forms is doing shady shit in the first place.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI hear what you are saying, but with regards to: << they're the backbone of the economy In US selling is absolutely the backbone of the economy. Granted, it is often selling crap and/or bs, but it is still selling. All that said, 'lead generation industry' is not sales. Sales is people who use those leads. I just want to make sure we are clear on the distinction.
- xbar 4y agoRight. Selling is selling. This guy and his mantra for saving the "leads generation industry" is comedy. Or marketing. I'm not sure which.
- klabb3 4y ago> In US selling is absolutely the backbone of the economy. Just because harassment is involved in much of our economic transactions doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t buy stuff in a world without harassment. It’s just like cutting in line: all it does is change who gets first (for the worse), it doesn’t impact the flow of traffic overall.
- naikrovek 4y ago> In US selling is absolutely the backbone of the economy. you're right; I forgot that it is impossible for money to change hands without a salesman in there somewhere.
- Spivak 4y agoI mean sales and marketing at every company I've ever worked is who is paying my salary at the end of the day so I find it hard to disparage them, they're the garbage men and women who turn stuff I build into dollars.
- ROFISH 4y agoGood. The text message harassment I have been getting is awful and I wish nothing short of a swift death to the “lead generation industry”. They’re the reason why my default ringtone for non-contacts is silent.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoHow do you set that up on iPhone?
- Sylamore 4y agoiPhone is easy: Settings -> Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers: On
- stuart78 4y agoThere is an ethical way to market products which relies on transparency to the audience and not tricking or repurposing leads for secondary purposes. Blocking more of these shady tactics makes it easier to do the right thing and requires you to build marketing programs for and around people who actually want your offering.
- rqtwteye 4y agoTotally agree. Problem is that a lot of industries got way too used to shady practices. Especially online.
- prepend 4y agoI think the other problem, more serious I think, is that shady practices make more money. I like to think in the long term honest practices make more money from lifetime customer value, but cynically fear that from a profit maximization standpoint shady results in most money for the industry.
- doodlebugging 4y agoOne of the problems that I can see in building that marketing program for those who really want the service or product is that many of these transactions are one time transactions in that at the conclusion of the transaction, the customer no longer has a need for or interest in that service or product and so they are effectively a dead lead. Continuing to contact "potential customers" to sell them something they don't need will always be seen as an annoyance. There has to be a process for customer contact info to be scrubbed from the lists once a transaction has been completed. For example if I contact someone about long-distance transport of a vehicle I end up with dozens of calls and emails from companies claiming to be drivers all of whom will do it for the lowest price. Over time I select one of these companies or find another somewhere else. However, it can take months for the contacts to taper off with the email spam being the last thing to shut down. It is obvious that you only need to contact one company thru their website in order to get on the list of potential customers so they all sell contact info to each other. The last time I got an email reminding me that they are ready to transport my vehicle it had been two years since that vehicle was transported to me. This stale contact info has to be a drag on the system somewhere. I just mark all as spam and forget about it.
- mint2 4y agoWow I get they earn their money that way.. but it’s relying on clearly unethical tactics that are obviously undesired by society but not necessarily illegal yet. this really shows how regulations are required because otherwise people will do stuff like that.
- dismalpedigree 4y agoThe demise of unsolicited calls and texts cannot come soon enough. Ideally they would be tarred, feathered, and quartered, but I’ll settle for just putting them out of business.
- bredren 4y ago> Caught in the middle are the innocent companies trying to sell their legitimate products to interested consumers. They want no part of fraudulent leads Ah, yes. The innocent companies! Like those that lapped up ill-gotten leads from Facebook until consumers could actually choose not to have their habits collated and sold off. Companies will look the other way so long as the leads are cheap enough and result in sales.
- Ironlink 4y agoDoes this impact B2B lead gen, or just consumers?
- whstl 4y agoHopefully both. I'm also tired of spam in my company email account.
- gumby 4y agoI’m trying to find the downside here. The author clearly thinks that business can only exist if you annoy the prospect until they buy to make you go away. There are other, more customer friendly business models.
- prepend 4y ago> annoy the prospect until they buy to make you go away. It works for turning on my wifi even when I don’t want to. There are so many settings I enable just to make the nagware go away. I only access google properties through chrome for this same reason. There’s no way to tell google “I know that chrome exists, I don’t like it, I’m comfortable with my browser.” other than just using chrome. It seems to me that so many companies are sure of themself so much that no one would ever choose not to do the thing they want. Or they’ve decided they don’t care that it sucks, they’ll do it anyway to make money.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIt is possible to nuke the "use Chrome" and similar nags via uMatrix or a CSS stylesheet manager, by selecting and removing / setting "display: none !important" the specific elements. Not that the behaviour isn't Annoying As Eff and anticompetitive to boot.
- ChuckMcM 4y agoI think this is one of those cases where if the "lead generation" industry died in a fire I would be okay with that. At Google there was a poster that read, "For every search there is the perfect Ad" and someone had written on it, "most times that is no ad at all." which lasted for maybe a week and a half before it was taken down. So often there is no "value" to the person doing the action, the "value" is between the web site and the people who want to get information about you.
- arwhatever 4y agoAt Getty Images there was a meme printout of an angry cat someone put on the wall in the brake with a caption “I haz a disappoint in you,” I think pertaining to leaving the coffee pot empty. Someone came along and added a note “do you have appropriate permission to reproduce this image?” And if I recall, both parts stayed up indefinitely.
- ChuckMcM 4y agoOh that is fabulous.
- mjburgess 4y agoWell "lead generation" is about matching "needers" with "suppliers". Eg., suppose a pipe breaks, you search for plumber, you find a plumber. That search is a lead generator for that plumber. That search is "free", by intuition, kinda destroys our sense of value in lead generation, right? Google should NOT be free for that plumber; the plumber should be paying quite a lot for the service. Suppliers of services need a system which allocates demand, right? Indeed, customers need a system of finding suppliers.
- prepend 4y agoI much prefer organic plumber results than ad. So google should be free for the plumber. The best result is almost never the ad. And in the rare situation where there ad is the best result, it’s an inefficiency because the poor plumber is paying for an unnecessary ad. We’re hitting a point where we always get shitty plumbers because they have good ads and don’t need to be good plumbers. Or even worse, most plumber ads are just lead generation where I get some random plumber driving 90 minutes because they bought the lead and responded first. I’d rather be in a world where the search surfaced the best plumber. Not some arbitrating middleman sucking value away from the plumber and the person with a backed up toilet.
- slenk 4y agoAs a consumer, this seems great for me.
- braingenious 4y ago>Going to be a bunch of long faces at LeadsCon this year. I have no idea why but I laughed out loud at this sentence. LeadsCon? Really?
- oefrha 4y agoMight as well call it ConCon for what it really is.
- braingenious 4y agoOh my god, tickets are a non-refundable $2k apiece. I think you might be right
- oefrha 4y agoWell I was thinking in terms of how the “lead generation industry” cons people into giving up their numbers to be spammed.
- DrewADesign 4y agoOr FREE if you connect your Facebook account, add your phone number, and sign up for their newsletter. They promise that they won't spam you, ever! (They can't speak for everybody who they sell your info to, though. They're not mind readers.)
- Nition 4y agoIs it OKAY if we make you fill all those out now anyway, or REMIND ME LATER?
- DrewADesign 4y agoDialog Box: [ Surrender To The Marketing Dept. ] [ Maybe Later ] [ Show Me Less Dialogs Like This* ] * Surrenders to the marketing department.
- 4y ago
- dzink 4y agoPlease, fix the text color - it’s so light it’s unreadable on a phone screen without major fidgeting.
- Timothycquinn 4y agoAs someone who manages code that sends out legitimate text messages for operational purposes, this is a good thing. By lowering the potential of spam situations, this will hopefully make legitimate text message sending easier to manage.
- mLuby 4y agoIsn't SMS considered insecure?
- grayfaced 4y agoOperational doesn't mean confidential. Sometimes reliability is the most important thing. For example sending a message to parents that school will be closed due to snow.
- mLuby 4y agoReliably getting the message to the correct recipient? I just have a bone to pick with all this software using phone numbers as ID or notifications. Send an email where we can filter it or if you must, do an app with notifications I can tune to my liking.
- darreninthenet 4y agoIs SMS considered reliable?
- sokoloff 4y agoMy kids’ school sends email, SMS, in-app, and phone (configurable by me, except for emergency notifications, which seem to either tree or hit them all). SMS is almost always the one I see first, but they seem to use it as just one layer in a reliability sandwich.
- JohnFen 4y agoMy experience is that it is about 98% of the time. Every once in a while, someone will send a text that takes multiple days to get to me, but that's about the only glitch I see.
- csours 4y agoI apparently got signed up for some company on my work email and now I get a series of emails from some B2B company. I unsubscribe. Next day, another company. Unsubscribe. Next day, another company. Its trivial, but it's so fucking annoying that I've visualized doing violent things as I hit unsubscribe.
- jonathanlydall 4y agoI especially love the cold contact B2B emails which I ignore, only to have a follow up email some weeks later to the effect of "I'm just following-up on the email I sent you previously...", as if I had actually ever expressed interest in doing business with them. If they were being honest the email would read "You probably deliberately ignored and deleted my previous email, but I'm hoping you're in that very low percentage of people that if I send this 'follow-up' email, maybe you'll be interested". The volume is low enough for now that I still add each sender's domain to our Exchange online's mail flow rules to block with a rejection message to the effect of "The recipient has deliberately blocked cold contact messages from senders such as yourself. Please remove the recipient from your mailing lists.". It brings me great satisfaction to know that going forward system f-off messages are being sent to these people with zero extra effort, or even knowledge on my part.
- samayylmao 4y agoI went to a Gartner conference one year because my work paid for it. RIP my work inbox ever since. my email has been sold and sold over and over again. Gartner tells you what you probably already knew them sells your information.
- JohnFen 4y agoWith the companies I've run in the past, I've set up temporary email addresses for all of my employees going to them, just because of this. The email addresses are removed a couple of weeks after the conference ends, which gives everyone time to give their actual email addresses to anyone who contacts them that they want to keep talking with.
- tag2103 4y agoWhile I appreciate the enthusiasm of the "Czar" the fact of the matter is the industry has had decades to "self police". Let the whole industry burn to the ground- it earned it.
- pedrovhb 4y agoI'm curious about examples in which industry self policing has actually worked in favor of customers. My intuition is that in an unregulated environment, incentives are the only thing that matters, and if one shop has a competitive edge by not observing some industry self police, it'll come out ahead and drive the alternatives to extinction. Perhaps the closest thing to this is to not be so extortive as to draw attention from regulators, but that's really just the incentive of going as far as possible before consequences. It seems this particular industry has miscalculated the position of the fine line.
- Eisenstein 4y agoDoes the IEEE count?
- AbusiveHNAdmin 4y ago[dead]
- jimbobimbo 4y agoDonate to one political campaign and suddenly you'll be getting text solicitations from all over the country every election cycle. F that, I want this regulation.
- hermitdev 4y agoI wouldn't get your hopes up, I'm sure there'll be an exemption for political activities...
- adrianmonk 4y agoVery likely since with the Do Not Call Registry (that already exists), there are exemptions for political campaigns, charities, debt collection, and a few other things. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/national-do-not-call-registry-faqs#what%20doesn't%20do https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/national-do-not-call-regis...
- bunabhucan 4y agoI door knocked for a candidate and had their campaign manager mark me as deceased in the main party db. No more texts.
- tssva 4y agoDoor knocking is even better than text spam at getting me not to vote for a candidate.
- prepend 4y agoI actually prefer door knocking. Sure it’s a greater inconvenience. But it’s much rarer than text. It’s also neat to see people who are passionate about something enough to walk around and knock on doors. The exception is when they have paid knockers instead of volunteers. It’s so sad for the people and the candidate who thinks that somehow helps their chances.
- 4y ago
- xcskier56 4y agoAnd while we’re at it, can we ban companies from sending me marketing email just because I used my credit card to buy something from you in your store. I feel like it’s square that’s driving this. I’ll buy a coffee or something small and immediately be signed up for that businesses email list. No consent, no option not to be emailed. Just automatically marketed to bc I swiped my card at their checkout.
- hackernewds 4y agoAs someone (biased) who has worked at Square, it is not Square (now Block) driving this. They are too distracted with cross-subsidizing Bitcoin daydreams to be focused on benefitting SMBs.
- DangitBobby 4y agoHow sure are you? I was pretty sure square was the responsible party when I got spam emails from a coffee shop as well.
- Veen 4y agoI wonder how much they paid a branding agency to come up that ingenious rebranding.
- mightybyte 4y agoRecently I've kind of felt like it's Twilio & similar that are driving this, because they have made tools for this kind of mass spamming of texts and calls widely accessible. I'm sure it's a very complex web of factors, incentives, etc. The question is are there any small and focused areas that regulators can target to clamp down on the problem. And the mass call/texting providers like Twilio seem like a promising possibility to me. I get so many spam calls and texts that it has basically rendered the traditional phone system completely useless.
- JohnFen 4y ago> I feel like it’s square that’s driving this. Square is who got me to stop using credit cards to buy things. I bought something at a Square terminal, and opted for no receipt. The next time I bought something at a square terminal, I noticed that they had my email address prefilled in their "email my receipt" selection. I'd never given them my email address. I was pissed. What followed was a week of harassing Square to try to get them to delete their records about me. They eventually said they did, but I don't know if they were truthful because I stopped using my card, so couldn't check.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoLmao spam callers on suicide watch. It’s absolutely hilarious seeing the begging and the coping from this guy as he desperately tries to persuade us that consumers need fraudlent call centres to live their lives. Nah, I think I’m alright thanks.
- popcalc 4y ago[flagged]
- qzx_pierri 4y agoI miss the days when chanspeak wasn’t spouted off across different forums & websites by fascinated newcomers.
- elihu 4y agoI'm having trouble coming up with any reason my response to this should be anything other than "Hallelujah!"
- DiscourseFan 4y agoThank god
- joshu 4y agoA bit of a ramble, but: There is something fundamentally broken about connection (messaging, email, phone, whatever) information being cloneable. Either a) the identifier of the channel by which you contact me requires something from your identity to use, so it can't be used by other people, or b) there is no core address, they are all tear-off contacts (analagous to a TCP session, I guess?) I suppose you would message the main core address, but it just sends a redirect to a new channel. New channels have low reputation by default, and if you delete it (because the other end shared it, or whatever,) they have to get a new tear-off and start over.
- trimethylpurine 4y agoHow does this guy sleep at night?
- aa-jv 4y ago"TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST AND NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN." - burn this into your brain and state it as quickly as you can next time you get one of those "Mr. AA-JV, I'm calling to tell you about a worrying situation with your PC .." calls. Works every time. They know what it means.
- mightybyte 4y agoI'm always torn between this and the advice that any response just validates for them that there's a real person behind the contact info and therefore it's definitely valuable to keep spamming.
- aa-jv 4y agoI've had it work effectively in the past. I once had the guy waiting for 10 minutes while I found my 'password', which he was eager to have me read to him over the phone. You can imagine what it was. :) His response: "you bloody bastard, I <expletive> <expletive> mother .. "<CLICK>
- tankerkiller125 4y agoMy solution is just to play an extremely loud and annoying tone over the phone (such as a siren sound), not only do they hang up extremely quickly. They never call again.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoI have been objecting to third party consent dialogues for some time. It seems like a cheap cop out. Who manages my consent of the third party consent dialogue provider to store my consent? Yet another third party? See the problem? An honest website will keep the data itself and not share consent info with an unrelated third party. Users deserve at least that much.
- thrwwy84372727 4y agoFormer employee at Assurance IQ, the company from the article. One of our data scientists determined that the sketchy lead sales were a net negative to a customer’s lifetime value. Assurance IQ kept doing it because it makes (less) money faster. It built a whole marketplace around this junk: https://www.gonectar.com https://www.gonectar.com The former CEO did it to make quick money. Current leadership sticks with it out of ineptitude. Something like 12 out of the last 13 quarters were unprofitable.
- prepend 4y agoThis gives me hope for the future. I’m ok with shutting down the “honest leads” along with all the others as those are few and far between. I had a neighbor who owned a common .com for housing construction that was top seo and all it did was collect your info and sell the lead. I had actually used it before I met my neighbor and hated it. He ran it in the least scammy way possible, but it still boiled down to having a bunch of contractors call and email me and the experience was bad. I think phone calls should be run like apple does push notifications. Someone who doesn’t care (apple) confirms you want them and provides a simple way to turn them off when you no longer want them. I’ve had very few spam push messages and never two from the same org as I just block them. Texts and calls should be similar. Agreeing to be contacted by one vendor and then getting stuff forever from anyone that vendor sells to is ridiculous.
- hasmanean 4y agoTerms and conditions forms online are such a joke. We thought the ancients were cruel and heartless but here we are signing forms we cannot comprehend and using them as a basis for denying people legal protections.
- elefantastisch 4y agoGreat. What I really want is mandatory opt-in to be able to contact me. Unknown numbers get to send a single standard length SMS, carrier embeds the full legal name and, for businesses, legally registered mailing address, and I can choose whether to accept. If I don't, no other contact from that number is connected to my phone. Ever. I can also report the message as unsolicited and every company's unsolicited contact stats are made available to regulators.
- hgsgm 4y agoThat's already the law (except for politicians), which is why this article is about a rule change to the kind of consents that are valid.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoLead generation means selling my name to other businesses. I want my cut. If I get a call, email, or text from a business that bought my name, they need to include payment in the message of the same amount they paid the lead generator, whether I end up using their service or not. If not, their message goes straight to the spam folder and I never see it. You gotta pay to bypass my filter.
- coreyp_1 4y agoTwo months ago, evidently someone put my number on some online form somewhere. I now get multiple messages/calls a day, addressed to "Lora", offering to help her with everything from insurance, to counseling/therapy, to public assistance, to rental properties. In the last 2 weeks, the calls are all Spanish-speaking. My # is on the do not call list. Guess how much that helps... Different situation: 2 years ago, I needed to move across the country. My dad decided to help and so he put my phone # into a website to give you a quote for moving. I was instantly inundated by calls from multiple moving companies, all of which sounded "off", all from that one form. (BTW, several of these companies were out of Florida. Just do a quick online search for florida moving company scams.) As a final note, it was cheaper to rent a truck from Penske and hire a friend to drive it the 1,000 miles. And, in case you care, Penske was $1,000 less than U-Haul and had better guarantees... I strongly recommend them!
- darkarmani 4y agoI find this part the most interesting. How do I easily sue companies for TCPA violations? > There’s another problem too– professional plaintiffs (and their lawyers) exploit the abuses in the industry and fill out forms by the barrelful to set up TCPA lawsuits. These days it is REALLY hard to tell the difference between lead fraud and litigator fraud until you are deep into a case. Burn it all to the ground.
- cratermoon 4y agoHow many times have you seen a company with a privacy policy saying something like, "we value your privacy, we'll never sell your data" and also having a clause about sharing your data with companies they already do business with? Oh, they're not selling your data, they're sharing it. It's such an obvious loophole buried under gobblygook language.