Posted by geox 2 days ago
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.
Also, getting SMS from email addresses. Nobody asked for that feature, please nuke it.
I get several sales people bugging me on email and LinkedIn per day. Of course I block them all but it just sickens me.
Also the energy company scammers in Spain are still going strong. Even on local numbers.
If they're calling from within the EU then a cross-country judgement is still enforceable, so I assume they aren't doing that.
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.
twilio can hardly be described as "providing service to one country", and has the same price list whether I'm using an American VPN or Dutch VPN:
No, you're just reading too much into "local". The price page for US also only has "local" only, but I know for a fact that "long distance" calls work fine.
There is many ways of doing spam/fraud, think also that some are not very clever nor have good financial literacy, they just don't know the best mechanisms due to lack of education in tech (and the dark side).
For example, some would pay an infected residential network for $5 per GB, and some will only pay $0.10 per GB, depending on how knowledgeable they are.
Most calls/bulk SMS can be done cheaply by just buying Stolen VoIP enterprise accounts (available on a ton of forums), a "scam" operation will resort to any way possible because they don't have any law affecting them as they do so already illegally, it's not the same as "marketing calls".
businesses obviously keep doing unsolicited telemarketing calls because it works to some extent
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.
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).
If it is someone that I actually know, they will be aware how to actually reach me.
Scams are not what I would define as "telemarketing" though.
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.