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I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

• markstahler 14y ago
  Well done. Now I want to explore Canadian law on the matter.
  • dos_equis 14y ago
    Keep us posted!
• latch 14y ago
  The first call after he goes on the DNC is clearly a violation. The calls thereafter, when he's stringing them along...not so sure. Once you start saying "I'm interested, tell me more"...I think the company has a fairly solid claim of having a business relationship...if not legally, certainly ethically.
  • michaelrkn 14y ago
    That's why I didn't sue for any of the calls after I talked to a rep - only the automated calls, and the call that came after I asked to be on the DNC list.
  • pavel_lishin 14y ago
    What about the very first call? That's certainly a violation as well.
    • latch 14y ago
      I agree that 1 or more calls were improper. And threatening to sue for that and getting money is fine. Maybe it doesn't matter that the last X calls weren't if the first Y calls were...still seemed worth pointing it out.
  • ianferrel 14y ago
    In my opinion, the fact that there's no way to figure out who is calling you and hold them accountable without stringing them along makes this an ethical thing to do.
    • rdtsc 14y ago
      Yeah I think it sort of puts it in the hands of the judge at that point (I am talking about a small claims court). I would be interesting to find out what would have happened in court. Even with the most business-sympathetic judge, he should at least allow for the first couple of calls to be admitted as violations because in those cases he clearly did not have any semblance of a business relationship with them. The most consumer-sympathetic judge would allow all calls to be counted against the company as the person did explicitly ask to be put on the DNL. He expresses an initial interest but then decided he didn't want anything to do with the company.
  • bbrtyth 14y ago
    I read there were some calls inbetween that he didn't count. After that, he asked to be put on their Do Not Call list, and they still called a few more times. So violations for the first few and the last few.
• yashchandra 14y ago
  Great. I am getting calls from one company every day twice. I called them and asked them to stop calling. They said sure done. But the calls have not stopped. I am inspired by your post.
  • jay_m 14y ago
    I used to have this same problem. I'd get called twice a day by the same company, and if I picked up, they would just hang up the phone. Eventually I got tired of this so when I picked up one of their calls, I opened with "Hi, PizzaPizza here, may I take your order please?" After that they never called again.
    • yashchandra 14y ago
      nice. I will try that next time :)
      • maxerickson 14y ago
        Do you answer twice a day? (I would think even scammers stop wasting time on people that are not likely customers)
        • yashchandra 14y ago
          No I do no answer and usually ignore. But they still keep calling. I think it could be an automated robo call ?
          • maxerickson 14y ago
            I'm sure it is some sort of automated system. I'm wondering if answering a call and saying no would get your number out of the system.
• eslachance 14y ago
  (Edit: please ignore the following line, I misread. Kept for posterity.) The title is incorrect. He threatened to sue but didn't actually do it. Which I'm all for. (/Edit) I received, just yesterday, a call from a company claiming they could reduce my credit card interest rate to "up to 0%", but it was obviously a scam as he said he worked both for Visa and Mastercard, claiming it was "the same company and they both use the same Reduce Interest Rate department". I unfortunately lost my nerve a little and called him out, after which he became much more familiar, aggressive and even insulting. Don't have anything beyond a phone number and a name (which is probably fake). Wish I could find the nerve to do this myself.
  • pavel_lishin 14y ago
    He most certainly sued: > I wrote back giving them the dates and caller IDs of the calls, and when I didn’t hear back in a week, I filed my suit. He just settled out of court before appearing in front of a judge. > Wish I could find the nerve to do this myself. Why don't you? What do you have to lose, aside the time trying to track them down?
    • eslachance 14y ago
      Oh I misread that as "I threated to sue if I didn't hear back in a week". Oops, sorry, my bad. As for trying it myself, I guess it's simply because whenever I get into such a situation, I lose my nerve, butterflies invade my stomach, and I can't think straight. Just calling Visa to try to report it gave me the same kind of jitters, I really hate it. I will, however, report the information I have in my possession to my local police department. That way perhaps I'll lead them to something, if I'm lucky. Nervous or not, I can try to do my part.
      • michaelrkn 14y ago
        The best place to report illegal calls is http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm. Your local police department probably won't have any idea what to do with the complaint. Good luck!
• _sentient 14y ago
  It would be nice if the author had laid out some examples of how telemarketing can be done correctly, without breaking any laws and risking this sort of response. Hopefully we will see a followup post that explains how Impact Dialing gets away with it, but I suspect that they benefit from all the fear and uncertainty.
  • michaelrkn 14y ago
    Hi Sentient. We actually mainly work with political campaigns, which are exempt from the regulations. I don't think we benefit from the uncertainty; it makes it difficult to explain to potential customers what is and isn't legal, and we turn away clients sometimes because they aren't familiar enough with the laws to know what's legal and what's not.
    • thesis 14y ago
      Political robocall campaigns are absolutely NOT exempt in every state. It's kind of odd that you'd make the initial post about how people need to do robocalls right and then you make a blanket statement how political campaigns are exempt.
      • michaelrkn 14y ago
        You're right about robocalls, but we primarily deal in live phone calls, dialed by a computer but connected to a live person ("predictive dialing" or "power dialing"). These calls are almost always legal for political campaigns.
        • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
          Does that smell like manipulation of the statute to benefit the politicians at the expense of the voters to everyone else or just me? If the populus don't want unsolicited calls when did the politicians decide that they should over rule them and what's the protection against this sort of action happening in more serious situations?
• corin_ 14y ago
  > Although manually dialing is very rare, many of these regulations do not apply to manually dialing. Followed by > I already had three violations on my hand, but I knew I could get two more pretty easily. The next day, I called the alarm company and asked to be put on their internal Do Not Call list, and asked for a copy of their Do Not Call policy. A few days later, David called me again – violation number four. So he manually dialed, because of previous conversations indicating a genuine interest in the product(s). And that's a violation? Suddenly all interest in and respect for the author just went down the drain as far as I'm concerned.
  • michaelrkn 14y ago
    Hi Corin. I asked to be on their internal DNC list, and several days later, they called me again. That's illegal. Don't you think companies should have to respect your requests to be put on their DNC lists? I mean, if you unsubscribed from an email list and kept getting emails, wouldn't you be upset?
    • corin_ 14y ago
      He was in the middle of legitimate conversations with you. You have a product yourself, if I contacted you and implied I was interested in becoming a customer, and we got to talking about it over the phone, would you look up your DNC list every single time before calling me just in case I had, since we last spoke, contacted a colleague of yours to be put on it?
      • DanBC 14y ago
        Yes. That's the entire point of sanitising your lists. When someone asks you to stop calling them you remove their number and stop calling them.
        • corin_ 14y ago
          You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices. Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first. Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if asked by a customer to call them back (as happened in this case) would check a list before calling them back. It just wouldn't happen, ever. And frankly it shouldn't be expected to happen, the only time it would ever be useful to check a list is the very rare occurrence where the customer is trying to catch you out by telling you he's interested but he actually isn't.
• Killswitch 14y ago
  I like this article. I worked in telemarketing for a while, and was probably one of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Not only did the companies not give a crap about the laws, they didn't care about their supposed customers. We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued them into using it over much better and more established companies. Example: AAA tow services. I found myself trying to be the good guy in the situation and do my best to actually remove people from the call lists by marking them deceased and that. But even still the companies would always somehow get those numbers back into circulation hoping that nobody would notice. Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore.
  • larrys 14y ago
    "Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore." But this also proves something. From what you've written you knew you were doing something that was wrong. As one example: "We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued (sic) them into using it over much better and more established companies" But you had to earn a living so you did that. Now I don't know what your particular situation was or how badly you needed the job (proverbial relative dying of cancer or you would be homeless?) but it might be the same premise that the people running the business operate under. Everybody of course draws the line at a different point in terms of the "harm" they are willing to do. They feel that what they do is ok or possibly de-minimis but what someone else is doing on a larger scale (a guy who did what you did for 20 years or owned the business) is "bad". I'm curious (and not being judgmental that you worked there as we all have different lines) why you kept that job when you saw what they were doing?
    • jcc80 14y ago
      It's pretty obvious - he needed to feed & cloth himself. For some, (perhaps you?) there must be some catastrophic event to create day to day money problems. For many people, especially the often young students or mothers who work these jobs, day to day money problems are just a fact of life. Should people plan better so they don't have to compromise and do things they disagree with? Of course, but that isn't everyone's reality. edit: Or maybe he just wanted money for Spring Break...
    • 14y ago
• alain94040 14y ago
  Great, but the main problem is to find out who is calling you. I wish the phone company had some kind of obligation to give me that information, so I could trace back annoying telemarketing calls. Stringing them along until they reveal who they work for just doesn't work well. Another idea would be for banks to offer special credit card numbers, that get automatically flagged as bogus purchases. Any bank offering such a service? If I ever use the magic number, the transaction is perceived to go through, but it's actually tracked and no money is exchanged. Not sure if it's doable with respect to Visa and Mastercard networks.
  • michaelrkn 14y ago
    Thanks to Voice over IP, this is pretty much impossible to regulate any more. The telephone networks were built on a trust model that VoIP destroyed. Now, you can originate a call on the internet that's nearly impossible to trace.
    • randomfool 14y ago
      The current caller ID system is incredibly broken- I'm getting 3 calls a day to my personal cell phone from the same scammers and have not been able to get their real contact info. After watching all these TV shows with the 'hang up within 10secs or you'll be traced!' I expected AT&T to be able to help me out. No dice. Unfortunately the phone #'s are always random and AT&T just wants to sell me a service that allows me to block up to 30 phone numbers. But they're calling from more than 30.
      • wlesieutre 14y ago
        If you don't mind throwing more of your data to Google, you can port your number to google voice and block as many numbers as you like. It even has spam filtering for calls.
        • michaelrkn 14y ago
          I have my business line on GV and it filters out hundreds of spam calls.
• reader5000 14y ago
  Main culprits in this nonsense are the phone companies who profit off it at their customers' expense. It's basically like cable tv where you're expected to pay to watch commercials.
  • crusso 14y ago
    So you want the Phone Companies to get involved in policing the content of the calls that are made? When you order a phone line, should the Phone Company put you through a detailed and exhaustive screening process mandated by their lawyers because they've been sued for the contents of calls that some of their customers have made? Should they then be allowed to monitor your calls for violations of their AUP? I mean, if they're responsible for the content of your calls then they need to be able to monitor them, right? No, I completely disagree with you. Phone Companies aren't responsible for how their communication channels are abused any more than road builders are responsible for the getaway of bank robbers who use roads. Cable Companies' are a little different. Mainly because they tend to be the carrier of the content, the creator of the content, and the beneficiary of both. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that in many areas they have a government-enforced monopoly on the biggest data pipe into our homes.
    • Karunamon 14y ago
      >So you want the Phone Companies to get involved in policing the content of the calls that are made? I don't think it's beyond the pale to suggest that phone companies don't allow scammers on their network. Look what happens to ISPs who allow spambots. And there's no policing of content required, merely responding to valid third party reports.
    • reader5000 14y ago
      No I was thinking more non-batshit insane measures. For starters they could let you block calls from unknown numbers. Indeed, they could require some sort of licensing for numbers/entities originating large volumes of calls. They could also disallow caller id blocking. But the reality is abusive telemarketing tactics are a substantial revenue stream for them, so they dont give a shit.
• xxiao 14y ago
  like this. i was bothered by a caller so much that I had to switch my phone to a new number. yes I'm on the do-not-call list, but the calling company, or more likely some agent it contracts, does not care. the company is named italkBB and i was also getting calls from dish network for months after i ended the contract with them. there is Dell too, after i bought laptop from it i started t o get calls from them, I told them I'm not interested in their calls, but once a while i still get the call, guess it's because i was a customer?
  • maxerickson 14y ago
    If it is a legit call, ask to be put on their courtesy do not call list. It is fairly non confrontational (especially to the voice on the line) and a very direct signal that you are a dead lead.
    • goatforce5 14y ago
      Also, when cancelling a subscription service tell them the reason why you're cancelling is because you're moving overseas. When I did that in the UK (when I was moving overseas, as it happens) I found that it was a really effective way of bypassing all the usual retention nonsense and, i'd presume, any follow-up calls. If you're moving out of their service area, there's literally nothing they can do to keep you on their service.
  • pcopley 14y ago
    The OP can probably clarify, but I would imagine in the case of Dish network they were allowed to call you because they had a business relationship with you as a prior customer. The same with Dell as once you purchased the laptop they had an existing relationship. I'm not sure what the precedence is for internal DNC lists v. national DNC registry v. existing business relationships though, so they may still be at some legal fault.
• gwillen 14y ago
  I'd really like to make this work if I could, but I suspect it's impossible in my specific case: all the robocalls I get are scam calls, trying to sell me credit-score services which presumably don't exist. Is it likely that I can get a company name out of them, or that there is even a company to sue? (And since they are criminals anyway, they have no incentive to settle with me, since even if I win I'd never be able to collect.)
  • michaelrkn 14y ago
    There's actually a decent chance it's a real company. I once got a call for insurance that I was sure was a scam, but after playing them along for several calls, I found out it was a legit company. I talked to their CEO, who was very nice, found out their company name, and then explained to him that I could sue him for several thousand dollars. He apologized, said it was an outside firm that they had been working with, and said they had stopped working with that company because of complaints. I didn't sue them.
• Estragon 14y ago
  I really want to go after these stupid bastards who keep calling to offer me a credit card balance transfer. I can't track them down, though. Anyone had any luck with that?
• beeskneecaps 14y ago
  "I believe that, done right, telemarketing is an effective, appreciated way to get people services they want, deliver important political messages, and raise money for non-profits" This make anyone else cringe?
  • leephillips 14y ago
    Absolutely. There is no "right" way to perpetrate telemarketing. The only difference between this creep and the slime that he sued was that this guy is careful to adhere to the technical minutiae of laws that seem to have been partly written by the telemarketing industry themselves. This was just a sordid story of one antisocial jerk using the courts to extract money from a less savvy antisocial jerk. I especially like his use of "appreciated". I'm sure I appreciate getting a recorded call telling me whom I should vote for.
    • corin_ 14y ago
      I disagree, it depends on the telemarketing, though I do agree that the vast majority is terrible, and that anything using an automated dialer is terrible. Colleagues of mine in sales sometimes telemarket - in that they will cold call potential customers, but only people they have researched and genuinely think might want to advertise with us, and the track record of a.) people called who end up spending money with us and b.) of those people, the ones who are happy and become repeat customers, does show that in this situation telesales works great for both us and them. On the other side of good telemarketing, I'm in a position to get plenty of cold calls / cold emails myself, business related, and it's not rare for me to get one that genuinely interests me, and sometimes leads to me spending money with them and getting good results from it. So I don't mind getting those calls/emails. Outside of business I find them horrific, I've never had a good cold-call to my home landline or my mobile, presumably because for non-business sales it isn't worth doing any research into who I am and whether I'm a valid target. (But yes, I agree with your judgement in this particular instance.)
  • michaelrkn 14y ago
    Here's an example of what I think is telemarketing done right. We have a client that's a roofing company. They scout areas that have seen a lot of damage from storms, note the houses with roofing damage, and look up their phone numbers. They call the residents, explain how their home insurance companies usually cover most of the cost of the roof repair, and offer to schedule a time to take a closer look at the roof and give an estimate. I think it's mostly about targeting - don't just call tons of people with no reason, but focus on particular people who have a high likelihood of becoming a customer. Then call them with salespeople who know the industry, be helpful and courteous, and take people off your list who don't want to be called. And, of course, follow the law. Unfortunately, there's so much bad telemarketing that the good stuff has gotten drowned out, so it's easy to see it all as bad.
• drivingmenuts 14y ago
  I'm going to have to make a note of this to get the telemarketer that keeps calling my cellphone (my only phone) about cruises.
• jakejake 14y ago
  Oh how I would love to do this. Unfortunately a place selling home security seems relatively easy to find who is calling. Not that it actually is easy - in fact it seems it required a good amount of social engineering. The calls I have gotten are for credit reduction or other dubious services and the impression I get is that their whole operation is shady and secretive - and perhaps not even a legitimate business at all. When one of those wakes me up at 8am on a Sunday I thirst for their blood!
• Porter_423 14y ago
  I like this article,Great idea!!!
• sevenstar 14y ago
  That was a great read. Not even telemarketers like telemarketers.
• eli 14y ago
  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but none of this (do not call list, TCPA) applies to a business phone line, correct? I get constant sleazy robocalls on a business line.
  • pcopley 14y ago
    Correct. Business phone lines (generally) exist to get unsolicited phone calls from people with whom the owner has no existing business relationship.
    • eli 14y ago
      It might be true that business owners are more willing to receive business calls... but I assure you that nobody wants these robocalls for obvious scams.
• tnorthcutt 14y ago
  Please make your company's logo link to your company's home page, rather than the blog. Alternatively, please provide an (obvious) link to the home page elsewhere on the blog.
• tomjen3 14y ago
  The solution to this is to put these people in prison. Phone harassment (and telemarketing is harrasement) is theft of attention and that ought to be as illegal as any other kind of theft.
  • jwallaceparker 14y ago
    Prison should be for violent crimes. This kind of thing should be settled in civil court - as it is.
    • tomjen3 14y ago
      If I take your car, do you sue me or call the cops?
      • talmand 14y ago
        violent: acting with or characterized by uncontrolled, strong, rough force violence: an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws I would say some would label stealing a car as a violent action. But of course different people's definition will vary.
• matthew_tovbin 14y ago
  Instead of wasting my time I use MrNumber app (http://mrnumber.com http://mrnumber.com) to block unwanted calls and texts.
• pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  >But first, you might wonder why this post is on the blog for a company that sells telemarketing software. // I assume to boost backlinks. What's more link-baity than a telemarketer mouthing off about telemarketers?
• alan_cx 14y ago
  Profitable, commendable, and a fine example to us all, but BORING!!!!! Before I go on, yes, I do have way too much time on my hands, and a hugely immature area in my brain. I like to go for creative abuse. Immediately I start arguing and generally giving them a hard time, winding up to virtual verbal abuse until.... ...two things happen. They hang up, and never call back. Bonus: I feel better for getting some stuff off my chest. Dirt cheap therapy which they pay for!!!! Triple win. Yay!!!! Dunno what its like in the US but here in the UK it seems that these people are not allowed to hang up. Big no no, from what I can tell. So, a great game is to time how quickly you can get them to hang up, or how long they can last out. Should I grow up and generally get some sort of life? Yeah, probably.
  • rytis 14y ago
    Not sure about verbal abuse... I try to stay polite however annoying they might be. I've tried to countersell stuff, just for fun. "listen, glad you called, coincidentally I have this great 6 yr old laptop, which you might be interested in. It's only £239.99. What do you think? I accept paypal..." Once I got transfered to a "team lead", who prommised to think about it and call back. He never did...
• jrockway 14y ago
  My favorite feature of Google Voice is the "block caller" button. Works like a charm.
  • rdtsc 14y ago
    I am sure these people are smarter than just using a single number. They can just use random number every time. You could for example have a white-list but that's won't quite work for most people.
    • jrockway 14y ago
      They could use a random number every time, but they don't. If they start doing that, I'll enable Google Voice's feature that requires an unknown caller to say their name before the phone call is accepted.
      • rdtsc 14y ago
        That's pretty cool. Actually my friend implemented a feature on his home phone (he is old school) that had a recording answering the phone and it said, if you are human press "8". If they did then the actual phone would ring, otherwise I guess I just hung up or just kept them on the line. So he screened all the pre-recorded crap.
        • angry-hacker 14y ago
          I don't live in USA so the question might sound stupid. Are there 100% automated calls coming from marketers? What are they saying... do they just tell you about a product or..?
          • rdtsc 14y ago
            Yap. "We are calling to talk about your car. Do you know that you can get a lower car insurance in your state. There is some new law that lets you blah...blah...blah. Press 1 if you would like to sign up." Or "Do you know Obama is from Mars. He has an Alien living inside of him and telling him what to do. Do not vote for Obama" This is very common for political campaigns as those are also except from some laws that a design to stop these.
• webjprgm 14y ago
  Yay! I hate telemarketing calls. There are 3 I tend to get. 2 of them are from places that I clearly did give my number too, one of which is a non-profit I've asked to stop calling me and the other is a car company that keeps trying to get me to trade in my car. The third is something in spanish that starts off with "felicitations, eres el ganador ..." which is where I hang up every time. Fortunately those have become rare lately. All are to my personal cell phone. I'm glad to hear someone did something in one case. My grandpa has long had the habit of shoving junk mail into the business reply envelopes for other junk mail. Hilarious, but I'm not quite that mean. But my grandpa used to work for the USPS, so maybe it's his way of supporting his old employer. :-)
  • burnvictim 14y ago
    I think the problem with the car trade-in and the Spanish call (I've heard it is a content sign-up type of thing) is that it's possible they're not even legit businesses. I'm guessing it's going to be really tough, if not impossible to find out the owner, let alone sue them and get any money. I would LOVE to do that, though.
• septerr 14y ago
  I don't know, the part about faking interest in order to get their contact info seems kind of like stooping down to their level. I don't think I could bring myself to do that. I might get on their do not call list and tell them straightforward that I am thinking of suing them if they don't stop calling me.
  • paulgb 14y ago
    I did that (faking interest to get their info) once and they harassed me for weeks. If you don't intend to take them to court, I wouldn't recommend it.
  • cowkingdeluxe 14y ago
    The whole point of faking interest was to figure out who they were, so he could sue them for the first violation and any other violation that occurred after placement on the DNC list.
    • prawn 14y ago
      And if it went any way towards discouraging even one company from robodialling random numbers, I'm all for it.
• smallegan 14y ago
  Bravo impactdialing.com this is a brilliant SEO play and will no doubt get you lots of backlinks related to telemarketing!
• nemik 14y ago
  "Now, I actually hope that telemarketers call me – it’s easy money." Did he just opt-in on his own website?
• readme 14y ago
  What OP did sounds like entrapment to me. There's no way of knowing whether they would have continued to call him had he not egged them on, yet he can still sue for each count. I think that's unfair.
  • readme 14y ago
    Downvote? Nice. I guess HNers don't realize that stealing from criminals is no more honorable than stealing from anyone else.
    • crumblan 14y ago
      He only sued for the first few times (before he tried to get their information) and the last few times (after he asked not to be called again).
• pg 14y ago
  Maybe this is true. But I'm glad HN has a feature that lets us mark a story so that it becomes a nofollow link no matter how many points it has.
  • loverobots 14y ago
    No doubt he can post a sanitized snapshot of the email exchanges to prove this is real :)
  • akanet 14y ago
    Could you elaborate? I thought the story was somewhat in the hacker spirit in that it exploited the oft-overlooked option of retaliating against spammers.
    • rmc 14y ago
      pg is doubting if this story is true, and thinks it might be a nice "stick it to the man" story. Since it's linked here it might be a SEO attempt to get a higher Google ranking for words like "telemarketer".
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  • imurray 14y ago
    I don't see a rel="nofollow" attribute on the link to the original post, or a meta tag in the page header(?). (Logged in or not.)
    • pg 14y ago
      Oops, there was a bug in that code that I just fixed.
• gbrindisi 14y ago
  I recorded a voice mail suited specifically for telemarketers. It's basically me faking a call and some interest to keep them busy ("Hello, yes... yes... ah-a.... umh...") and ending with "sorry mate you were talking to a voice mail, now would you like to leave a serious message?". I did it because I gave up trying to opt-out of every company calling me. The point is to irk them by keeping them on the phone (they are paid mainly by commissions so every second wasted counts) to the point they will flag me as a 'time-waster' and not call anymore. It works surprisingly well.