WIRED ON FRIDAY: Telemarketing is big business but it can be very annoying, especially if you are the one about to tuck into your dinner when the phone rings, writes Carol Power.
It is a familiar scene played out nightly in many US households. You are just about to sit down to dinner with your family and the phone rings.
When you answer it, there is a slight pause before a voice at the other end asks to speak to the household "decision maker" about changing your long-distance phone carrier or getting a new credit card, or starts out upon some other sales pitch.
Most Americans find the calls annoying and intrusive but this does not stop the almost nightly calls - which can sometimes come three or four times in one evening. You may also receive calls as early as 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
Telemarketing is big business. In fact, it is a $400 billion (€448 billion) a year business, with a significant portion of it occurring in New York state. In October 2000, New York's governor, Mr George Pataki, signed into law legislation to stop unwanted telemarketing calls and to protect consumers from potential telemarketing fraud. The FBI estimates telemarketing fraud costs consumers up to $60 billion a year nationwide.
The bill created the "Do Not Call" telemarketing sales calls registry to protect consumers from unsolicited sales calls, regardless of the call's geographic origin. Although the law provides for some exceptions, most telemarketing sales calls are prohibited 30 days after a number appears on the quarterly registry.
The registry is free to New York consumers and it is limited to residential telephone access lines. The registry does not block incoming calls but it is published for telemarketers so they can remove these telephone numbers from their internal call lists.
The "Do Not Call" law imposes a fine of up to $2,000 if a telemarketer calls a home listed on the statewide registry.
Only five states in the country maintain a central registry, but the New York registry is the largest. Three of the five states also charge for the service. In Florida, for example, there's a "no sales solicitation" calls list. A consumer can contact the state department of agriculture and consumer services and ask to be placed on the list. It costs $10 for the first listing and $5 annually to renew.
Under the 1990 Florida Telephone Solicitation Act, businesses covered by the law must purchase the list and are not supposed to call consumers who are on it. The law also makes it illegal to use recorded sales messages. There are some exemptions: non-profit organisations can call those on the list to seek donations, for example.
Some telemarketers use places such as Canada and the Republic to place their calls to the US since they are outside that jurisdiction.
For example, a friend of ours in Manhattan said she received a call from a major US bank's sales representative in the Republic, who was trying to sell her a credit card and was targeting the Irish-American community in particular.
There is another way to avoid taking telemarketers' calls. A company called Privacy Technologies in Glenwillow, Ohio, introduced a product last year called the TeleZapper.
The device, which is similar in size to a caller-ID machine, hooks into a telephone in less than a minute. It doesn't interfere with normal telephone calls but it does put an end to annoying telemarketing calls.
The TeleZapper can fool the telemarketer's computer into thinking that a phone number is disconnected. The computer will then delete that phone number from its database.
The TeleZapper only identifies a computer known as an auto-dialler or predictive dialler, which about 95 per cent of telemarketers use. Predictive diallers can dial three to five numbers simultaneously and can make as many as 500,000 calls between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m.
If a person with a TeleZapper answers a telemarketer's call, he or she will hear a beep and the sound of the would-be sales pitcher hanging up.
"The noise is like a zapping sound and that means we have zapped a telemarketer," said Mr Chris Flores, a supervisor in the customer service department at TeleZapper in Boston.
Manually dialled calls will not be zapped and neither will those picked up by voicemail. However, when an answering machine picks up the call, the TeleZapper can emit its special tone to zap the telemarketer. The TeleZapper costs $49.99 for each phone line and offers a 30-day in-home trial.
Initially, the product was only sold via a website, www.telezapper.com, and at amazon.com, but it is now sold throughout the US and Canada in stores such as Radio Shack, Best Buy, K-Mart and Wal-Mart.
"It may take two to three months before consumers can see results with the TeleZapper because there are millions of telemarketers out there and many of these firms exchange numbers," Mr Flores said.
