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France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week
- mhrsntrk 2mo ago[flagged]
- nephihaha 2mo agoThere is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to, or has had previous dealings with. Many will be unsolicited but not all will be. Many of these calls are coming out of the Third World countries which are barely regulated in this regard, so good luck with enforcing it.
- greggoB 2mo ago> There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to Pretty much exactly how it is in Switzerland. I once had a rather unpleasant experience with my old internet provider (Sunrise) where I asked the telemarketer who called me not to do so again, and was told they "had a right to do so, because I was a customer". I immediately cancelled, quoting this as the reason why (Sunrise would later try to tell me this never happened, but that's another story). With that said, I think it does make a difference: if some random company calls, they can't lose my business because they don't have it; if a company I am a customer with calls and refuses to stop when I ask them to, they risk losing my business. I don't know if this is the reason why, but I barely get any telemarketing calls (never heard of anyone else here who has either).
- bonesss 2mo agoAnother moment of potential irritation: companies being bought out or losing their network supplier giving that third company a business relationship with you.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 2mo agoWhich is why nowadays I never take calls if the prefix is from a country I don't have connections with, it is private, or doesn't map to any of my contacts. If it is someone that I actually know, they will be aware how to actually reach me.
- Pinus 2mo agoIf I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)
- frollogaston 2mo agoThere was a time I had a scheduled job interview and got two spam calls from the same area code as the interviewer 2 minutes before. The third time, I hung up on the actual interviewer.
- nephihaha 2mo agoI paid for a spam call blocking service about twenty years ago. The annoying thing is not only did it fail to prevent the spam calls from abroad, when someone was trying to call me from Germany it wouldn't let the call through.
- TitaRusell 2mo agoCompanies aren't allowed to do cold calling in my country. Wiped out an entire industry and nobody wept. Scams are not what I would define as "telemarketing" though.
- bookofjoe 2mo agoIt would be helpful to know your country in this thread.
- kotaKat 2mo agoI'd like to see forced legislation requiring marketers to disclose the exact source and campaign they acquired your data in. I've been getting a barage of non-stop harassment via unwanted magazine subscriptions. People Inc claims some company called "Subco" signed me up and won't allow me to cancel, only "Subco" can do that. "Subco" then claims they got my information from someone else down the line. They then blame someone else, someone else... ... and I still have no clue who the hell decided to sign me up for 20 magazines in the mail.
- LorenPechtel 2mo agoYup. Someone clearly scraped my LinkedIn and sold the info as a bogus lead, I've been getting several texts/day about business financing, and the occasional call. Ironically, the calls were better--every caller understood they had bad data and never tried again.
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoIn my experience most of these came from France itself or from Italy. Not exactly third world, eh?
- frollogaston 2mo agoOther person should've specified, the person calling is in a third-world country but they're dialing from inside via some voip service. So then what I don't get is, can't they go after the voip services?
- nephihaha 2mo agoA lot of the ones here appear to have originated in India, which had a major regulation problem for a while (although I think the Indian government has begun to deal with it.) A lesser proportion were from countries in Africa.
- lifestyleguru 2mo agoWhat's the status of discounts granted in exchange for marketing consent? Because that's how they bait many older consumers into receiving these calls.
- dolmen 2mo agoMarketing consent is granted via sweepstakes.
- alexbelyanin 2mo ago[flagged]
- jordiburgos 2mo agoIt happened in Spain months ago. Then the "marketers" start calling from international phone numbers.
- inigyou 2mo agoLet them pay international rates. One dollar a minute, eh? If they're calling from within the EU then a cross-country judgement is still enforceable, so I assume they aren't doing that.
- nxm 2mo agoIs it though in practice?
- gruez 2mo ago"International rates" aren't a thing anymore since the advent of VOIP. It doesn't matter whether you're connecting from France or Fiji, with VOIP you pay the same rate.
- inigyou 2mo agoThere are three kinds of VOIP you could be talking about. The first kind sends your call out from a local number in the country you're calling to. So someone in France has a French number, and you can use it following French local tariffs + a bit. The owner of this number would be prosecuted if he didn't cooperate with enforcing the law. The second way is that you use IP to connect to your own country's PSTN. Normal international rates apply. The third is that you use a platform like WhatsApp with no relation to the PSTN. In this case I don't know how the law applies. The fourth kind (which you are not talking about) is that your PSTN carrier privately uses IP to connect to the French PSTN carrier but it looks like PSTN on both sides.
- gruez 2mo agoAt least in the US, VOIP providers (think google voice or twilio) interconnect with telephone companies similar to how landline/cellphone companies interconnect with each other, so #1 and #4 are essentially the same. The only difference is what the "from" number appears as. If you look at the price lists of voip providers, you'll note that the only factor that determines the price is where you're calling to, not where you're calling from.
- mkj 2mo agoAustralia banned telemarketing a while ago, it worked pretty well. The only spam phone calls left are 100% illegal scammers. https://www.acma.gov.au/telemarketing-and-e-marketing https://www.acma.gov.au/telemarketing-and-e-marketing they give out million+ dollar fines which sort things out. Just being a customer doesn't allow them to send marketing, you have to opt in.
- ActionHank 2mo agoIt's the year 2026, I refuse to believe that phone companies cannot figure out who is a scammer and who is not.
- KuriousCat 2mo agoIf financial incentives align, we will be surprised how effective they would become.
- thisislife2 2mo agoMany scammers use internet telephony to call someone and some even spoof the caller id. In India, the mobile companies request subscribers to report any international call which shows local spoofed caller ids to them, so they can investigate it. So I am guessing it is trickier than we believe to track them ...
- frollogaston 2mo agoCan they at least flag calls as being from voip?
- thisislife2 2mo agoIf it is local, they probably can. But VoIP being international is the problem. See Why in the year of our lord 2022 am I still getting robocalls??? - https://www.vox.com/recode/22882647/robocalls-robotexts-scams-stir-shaken-voip-extended-warranty https://www.vox.com/recode/22882647/robocalls-robotexts-scam... ...
- mdrzn 2mo agoYou can ban these practices as much as you want, but what we really need is ENFORCING. I have to be able to report a phone number that called me, and have them either fined or blocked at the national level for spam.
- bionsystem 2mo agoWe have that in France already it is called bloctel
- Rygian 2mo agoBloctel is becoming obsolete due to this change.
- erelong 2mo agowhat does HN think are the better alternatives to cold contact? businesses obviously keep doing unsolicited telemarketing calls because it works to some extent
- yourusername 2mo agoDoes there have to be a alternative? Companies preying on the elderly and uninformed is not something we necessarily need as a society. (99% of my telemarketing calls are scams where they pretend to represent my current power company to get me to sign a contract with a different company).
- xtajv 2mo agoBuild a product worth purchasing.
- stalfosknight 2mo agoThere does not need to be an alternative. It just needs to stop.
- twister2920 2mo agoselling fentanyl works pretty well too from a business perspective
- LorenPechtel 2mo agoMost unsolicited telemarketing is inefficient--and that means a high cost of making the sale, which means whatever they are offering is either too expensive, too low quality, or an outright scam.
- frollogaston 2mo agoWasting the telemarketers' time
- bobro 2mo agoAnnoying tons of people so some small percent buys your stuff is a shitty thing to do. Their winning more than they lose from being shitty isn't something we have to offer an alternative to.
- ptek 2mo agoMake c5 great again <3
- Telaneo 2mo agoGood!
- ogou 2mo agoThis could be dealt with in the U.S. with simple enforcement, but would also limit political parties soliciting by phone and that is my conspiracy theory for why it isn't enforced. It is trivial to find the VoIP providers that are providing the numbers to these telemarketing companies. NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administrator) has a tool for finding them. https://nanpa.com/sites/default/files/2025-03/InstructionsForLawEnforcement.pdf https://nanpa.com/sites/default/files/2025-03/InstructionsFo...
- wolvoleo 2mo agoThey should do the same here in Spain and not just for consumers but B2B as well. I get several sales people bugging me on email and LinkedIn per day. Of course I block them all but it just sickens me.