I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

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.<p>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.<p>But even still the companies would always somehow get those numbers back into circulation hoping that nobody would notice.<p>Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore.

&#62; <i>Although manually dialing is very rare, many of these regulations do not apply to manually dialing.</i><p>Followed by<p>&#62; <i>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.</i><p>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.

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.<p>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.

(Edit: please ignore the following line, I misread. Kept for posterity.)<p>The title is incorrect. He <i>threatened to sue</i> but didn't actually do it. Which I'm all for.<p>(/Edit)<p>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.

"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"<p>This make anyone else cringe?

The first call after he goes on the DNC is clearly a violation.<p>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.

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.

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.<p>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.

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?<p>(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.)

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.<p>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!

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

Yay! I hate telemarketing calls.<p>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.<p>I'm glad to hear someone did something in one case.<p>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. :-)

&#62;<i>But first, you might wonder why this post is on the blog for a company that sells telemarketing software.</i> //<p>I assume to boost backlinks. What's more link-baity than a telemarketer mouthing off about telemarketers?

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?".<p>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.<p>It works surprisingly well.

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.

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

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?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but none of this (do not call list, TCPA) applies to a business phone line, correct?<p>I get constant sleazy robocalls on a business line.

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

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.

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.

Profitable, commendable, and a fine example to us all, but BORING!!!!!<p>Before I go on, yes, I do have way too much time on my hands, and a hugely immature area in my brain.<p>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....<p>...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!!!!<p>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.<p>Should I grow up and generally get some sort of life? Yeah, probably.

Instead of wasting my time I use MrNumber app (<a href="http://mrnumber.com" rel="nofollow">http://mrnumber.com</a>) to block unwanted calls and texts.

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.

"Now, I actually hope that telemarketers call me – it’s easy money."<p>Did he just opt-in on his own website?

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

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.

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.

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?

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.