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I received my number within a week for free without hassle, but I applied some years ago. After that, I received continued phone calls on the registered phone n

I received my number within a week for free without hassle, but I applied some years ago. After that, I received continued phone calls on the registered phone number from companies claiming to have some association with DUNS. This continued to the point that we actually changed the company phone number to avoid these people. We left the old number working for a while, and the only calls were DUNS spam. After we dropped the old number we found only one disadvantage to having our DUNS contact details being out of date. When we applied for one of the more verified SSL certificate packages available, the company phoned the number on the DUNS database to verify. But that could be worked around, and a bit of hassle there was far outweighed by the advantage of stopping the spam calls. So linkbait headline? No, I would agree from several years of having been on their database.

Tloewald 14y ago
Registering a business name seems to have much the same effect, so I'm not sure it's merely DUNS. Similarly my wife at some point had to register some kind of entity to get reimbursed for speaking at a conference and immediately unleashed a torrent of spam. (Correction — my wife's torrent of spam was from DUNS :-)). But hey, mine was just a normal business name registration, and i got the same result. The US is plagued with cold-calling spammers — just part of the American Experience.
- davidjgraph 14y ago
  I'm not in the US, I'm in the UK. Cold calling is against the law to TPS registered phone numbers and very rarely happens. DUNS is the main exception in the time I've been in business.
  - Tloewald 14y ago
    It's supposed to be against the law in the US, especially to cell phones, but it's still horribly common,
    - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
      If it is against the law but nobody enforces the law then it is a meaningless law. In the UK they rarely enforce it but often enough so companies think twice. They also tell the telephone networks hosting the spam callers to kick them off.
      - eli 14y ago
        Enforcing a US law against VoIP scam artists in other countries is not trivial.

Tloewald 14y ago

Registering a business name seems to have much the same effect, so I'm not sure it's merely DUNS. Similarly my wife at some point had to register some kind of entity to get reimbursed for speaking at a conference and immediately unleashed a torrent of spam. (Correction — my wife's torrent of spam was from DUNS :-)). But hey, mine was just a normal business name registration, and i got the same result. The US is plagued with cold-calling spammers — just part of the American Experience.

davidjgraph 14y ago
I'm not in the US, I'm in the UK. Cold calling is against the law to TPS registered phone numbers and very rarely happens. DUNS is the main exception in the time I've been in business.
- Tloewald 14y ago
  It's supposed to be against the law in the US, especially to cell phones, but it's still horribly common,
  - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
    If it is against the law but nobody enforces the law then it is a meaningless law. In the UK they rarely enforce it but often enough so companies think twice. They also tell the telephone networks hosting the spam callers to kick them off.
    - eli 14y ago
      Enforcing a US law against VoIP scam artists in other countries is not trivial.