There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to, or has had previous dealings with. Many will be unsolicited but not all will be.
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.
> There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to
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).
Another moment of potential irritation: companies being bought out or losing their network supplier giving that third company a business relationship with you.
Which is why nowadays I never take calls if the prefix is from a country I don't have connections with, it is private, or doesn't map to any of my contacts.
If it is someone that I actually know, they will be aware how to actually reach me.
If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)
There was a time I had a scheduled job interview and got two spam calls from the same area code as the interviewer 2 minutes before. The third time, I hung up on the actual interviewer.
Companies aren't allowed to do cold calling in my country. Wiped out an entire industry and nobody wept.
Scams are not what I would define as "telemarketing" though.
It would be helpful to know your country in this thread.
In my experience most of these came from France itself or from Italy. Not exactly third world, eh?
Other person should've specified, the person calling is in a third-world country but they're dialing from inside via some voip service. So then what I don't get is, can't they go after the voip services?
I'd like to see forced legislation requiring marketers to disclose the exact source and campaign they acquired your data in.
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.
Yup. Someone clearly scraped my LinkedIn and sold the info as a bogus lead, I've been getting several texts/day about business financing, and the occasional call. Ironically, the calls were better--every caller understood they had bad data and never tried again.