
I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000 - michaelrkn
http://www.impactdialing.com/2012/05/how-to-sue-a-telemarketer/
======
Killswitch
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
"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?

~~~
Killswitch
I was young and like stated, I needed a job and wasn't picky. Not to mention
when I started I didn't know what exactly was going on, because I was part of
another section that sold the Boston Globe newspaper before moving to the
shady side.

I only worked there for 3 months, then I told my boss to go fuck herself and
walked out.

Edit: and no offense taken, if you have any questions in regards to what
little bit I do know about such a crappy industry let me know. I am somewhat
knowledge in it.

Funny enough my current job is at a call center for a GPS company. I don't do
any calling though.

------
corin_
> _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
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_
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?

~~~
hermannj314
In his post he links to the Code of Federal Regulations. It allows for
mistakes to be made by the business.

This is what I read: It says: you can't call someone that says "Don't call me"
However, if you have a written policy to try your best and follow the law and
generally your business follows the policy, then you are not liable for
violating this rule if it was a simple mistake.

So the case of David calling him back a few days later may have been an honest
mistake. But the if the business did not have a written policy in place, have
training of the policy, maintain a list of DNC numbers, etc. then they are
liable for the mistake.

That's how I understand it. So it seems the law is forgiving for businesses
that are trying to follow the law. But I am not a lawyer, so my reading
comprehension skills are worth very little.

~~~
michaelrkn
I couldn't have said it better. I believe this business was not trying to
follow the law, so I sued them for everything I could. I mentioned in another
reply that there was another company who called me illegally, and I found out
that they fired the person who set up the calls I got. I didn't sue them.

~~~
tjoff
Well, you just turned this into a demonstration of a typical sue-happy
american and their crappy juridical system (a prejudice that a lot of
europeans have against america), you should have been thrown of court for
that.

------
alain94040
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
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _you can originate a call on the internet that's nearly impossible to
> trace._ //

Why do the phone networks route calls with faked originator numbers. I can see
why they don't block genuine numbers (that terminate at an actual phone) -- to
get you to pay for blocking. But surely they can tell that an incoming call
from a foreign call centre with a local number is fake.

Recently I've had calls, in the UK, from numbers where the [given] originating
number doesn't exist. Why any phone company would route these is beyond me.
(They're faked because we're signed up to do-not-call lists and they don't
want to be sued). More to the point is why the regulators (OFCOM) let the
phone companies get away with routing such calls.

~~~
MichaelGG
Phone numbers are not necessarily symmetric. A given number might legitimately
place a call via someone else's network. For instance, think about roaming.
You're calling with your local number, via another country's network. So, it's
not a super simple problem to solve everywhere.

~~~
spc476
Roaming doesn't work quite like that. My cell phone is associated with a "home
switch" (HS) (based on the provider and cell phone number [1]). When roaming,
my cell phone associates with a switch and becomes a visitor to that switch
(VS). The VS will inform the HS that it will handle my calls.

Now, when you call me, the HS gets "the call". It then contacts the VS. The VS
will assign a temporary phone number to my cell, and send this number back to
the HS. The HS then sends this number back to the switch making the call. That
switch will then call the temporary number, hitting the VS. The VS sees that
number and since it assigned that number to my cell, knows to "ring" my cell
phone.

And that's just for cell phones. That doesn't cover call forwarding, for
instance.

[1] Number portability adds another layer of indirection to this.

------
eslachance
(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
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
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
The best place to report illegal calls is
<http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm>. Your local police department
probably won't have any idea what to do with the complaint. Good luck!

------
beeskneecaps
"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
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_
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.)

------
latch
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.

~~~
ianferrel
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
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.

------
pg
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.

~~~
akanet
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
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".

------
_sentient
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
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
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
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
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?

~~~
jsprinkles
> Does that smell like manipulation of the statute

That's called business.

------
gwillen
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
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.

------
jakejake
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!

------
markstahler
Well done. Now I want to explore Canadian law on the matter.

~~~
dos_equis
Keep us posted!

------
webjprgm
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
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.

------
pbhjpbhj
> _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?

------
gbrindisi
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.

------
tnorthcutt
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.

------
sevenstar
That was a great read. Not even telemarketers like telemarketers.

------
Estragon
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?

------
eli
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
Correct. Business phone lines (generally) exist to get unsolicited phone calls
from people with whom the owner has no existing business relationship.

~~~
eli
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.

------
smallegan
Bravo impactdialing.com this is a brilliant SEO play and will no doubt get you
lots of backlinks related to telemarketing!

------
septerr
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.

~~~
cowkingdeluxe
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
And if it went any way towards discouraging even one company from robodialling
random numbers, I'm all for it.

------
readme
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
Downvote? Nice. I guess HNers don't realize that stealing from criminals is no
more honorable than stealing from anyone else.

~~~
crumblan
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).

------
alan_cx
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
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...

------
matthew_tovbin
Instead of wasting my time I use MrNumber app (<http://mrnumber.com>) to block
unwanted calls and texts.

------
drivingmenuts
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.

------
nemik
"Now, I actually hope that telemarketers call me – it’s easy money."

Did he just opt-in on his own website?

------
jrockway
My favorite feature of Google Voice is the "block caller" button. Works like a
charm.

~~~
rdtsc
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
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
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
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
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.

------
tomjen3
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
Prison should be for violent crimes.

This kind of thing should be settled in civil court - as it is.

~~~
tomjen3
If I take your car, do you sue me or call the cops?

~~~
talmand
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.

------
yashchandra
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
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
nice. I will try that next time :)

~~~
maxerickson
Do you answer twice a day?

(I would think even scammers stop wasting time on people that are not likely
customers)

~~~
yashchandra
No I do no answer and usually ignore. But they still keep calling. I think it
could be an automated robo call ?

~~~
maxerickson
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.

------
xxiao
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
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
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.

------
reader5000
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
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.

~~~
reader5000
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.

~~~
yashchandra
"For starters they could let you block calls from unknown numbers." They do
but you have to call them for this.

