Tele-Abusing Telemarketers

Factual Questions
1

You are not my lawyer, I am not requesting legal advice, etc.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that I have a friend who is being repeatedly called by those a*holes at Credit Account Services (it’s farking Anne this time, not Heather). Yes, this friend has requested to be put on the Do Not Call list, and in fact has been there for some time. Credit Account Services pays no attention to this. Yes, my friend has even reported them to the district attorney in the relevant state.

To no avail. Repeated calls, no matter what.

So, both to relieve his tortured feelings, and to do his bit to make the world a Better Place by driving telemarketers out of it, my friend has hit on the notion of being as verbally abusive as possible to whoever answers the phone after the robo-dialer connects. Very abusive - think of a nasty Pit rant delivered in person.

I was wondering if my friend were violating any law, or incurring any civil risk, from this entertaining but ultimately futile conduct? No threats of violence are made, apart from the implied damage that would be incurred should the telemarketer attempt many of the suggested acts. Nor have any of the insults been racist in nature. Mostly observations on their personal habits, background, the employment of their mothers, the circumstances of their birth, and recommended courses of action.

I am not asking if my friend can be sued - obviously anyone can be sued, even for frivolous reasons like hoping a telemarketer suffocates whilst performing cunnilingus on a dead walrus. I was merely wondering if there were any reason to believe that such a suit had any merit.

Discussions to date have only come up with one suggestion.

The scenario is
[ul][li]Phone goes ringy-ringy.[/li][li]Friend picks up.[/li][li]Chirpy voice-acting school drop out gives the canned lies about reducing credit card rates, and says to press 1 to speak to an operator. [/li][li]After pressing 1, the fun and abuse begin, and continues without pause until said operator gets tired of it and hangs up.[/li][li]Lather, rinse, repeat (unfortunately).[/ul][/li]
The suggestion is that, by pressing 1, in some sense the recipient of the call is consenting to the call, and therefore has some duty not to make it an occasion to remark that the mother of the operator had called during a break from her employment fellating dogs in a Tijuana sex show to say that she was ashamed of the career the operator had chosen.

I find it hard to believe that anyone is consenting to a call by hitting the button to opt out, especially since Credit Account Services obviously cares nothing about the law, but I was wondering if the Great Legal Minds of the Dope had any insights to share.

Mods, of course feel free to move this thread as appropriate.

Regards,
Shodan

2

(1) The classic SDMB thread on this topic: “The Telemarketer Speaks. I Respond.”

(2) I don’t think abuse is required. Just set the phone down next to a recording of somebody reciting the numbers from 1 to 1,000. Or maybe Fox News.

3

A friend of mine would just hand the phone to her two year old daughter who just loved talking on the phone…

4

In general, swearing or using obscene language on the phone is against the law. I think a “nasty Pit rant” would probably include some such language, so that would be illegal.

P.S. Why does ‘your friend’ ever press the 1 on such calls?
Just hanging up as soon as you hear the chirpy recorded voice wastes less of your time and is much less stressful.

5

Wait, what? Cite?

6

Credit Account Services? I don’t know anything about that company. Does your friend owe them a debt? Does he recognize the number and can just refrain from picking up? There are much better ways to resolve this.

Going along with the assumption that these are telemarketers and not debt collectors, verbally abusing the callers isn’t going to make the calls stop, and it isn’t going to make the caller feel any better. Auto-dialers don’t discriminate. He needs to block their number, or stop picking up, and spend more time investigating why they’re allowed around the do-not-call list (are they a charity? does he owe them a debt?). And keep pestering his atty general.

Don’t harass the callers. Does your friend have a conscience? Does he know anyone who’s unemployed and would kill to have even a shitty telemarketing job? They have families to feed, too. And in this down economy, I know lots of good people who would accept a telemarketing job. Your friend doesn’t need to piss in their faces for something that’s not their fault.

7

Here’s the thing, and I think this may be mentioned in the linked thread. When you’re nasty and rude to the telemarketer, they just put you in their system to get another call later on.

Personally, I’ve had the very best results by simply telling them, very nicely, “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number, there’s no Joey here.” The majority of the time, I never hear from them again. Of course, I get these calls at work, so I just pretend like they’re calling a house instead of a business and it usually throws them off.

8

Do you give up some of your 1st amendment rights when speaking on the phone? I’m gonna need a cite for that one.

9

harassment

10

Around here, it’s “Cardholder Services,” but the same thing.

Once when it happened to me, I pressed the button to be connected, the cheerful operator came on and asked me if she could help me and I said “Yes, I don’t want to be contacted…”

And the line went dead before I could say “…anymore.”

My guess is that the operators are trained to already have their finger on the drop button before they answer the call and your friend would be disconnected before he could even get “-ck you!” out of his mouth, thus depriving him of even the satisfaction of cussing out a minimum-wage employee.

11

We have a device called a telezapper. It attaches between the phone and the wall jack. It detects the pause before an automated dialer and sends back the same tone the machine would get if the phone had been disconnected. This in turn causes the automated dialer to remove the phone number from its listings. The only disadvantage is that certain international calls have a similar pause, so if you expect a lot of those you might have a problem.

12

From the receiver of the call? I’m extremely doubtful.

13

Yes, it sure does include swearing. Quite a bit, in fact. But this is just what I was asking - is it legal, or in violation of civil law in some way, to be very, very verbally abusive to a telemarketer?

Originally, ‘he’ pressed the 1 after repeatedly hanging up, so as to tell the operator “Do not call this number again”. As mentioned, this is to no effect - this is happening two or three times a day.

As opposed to asking to be put on the Do Not Call list or hanging up - the system calls again no matter what.

There we disagree. AFAICT, calling people who are on the Do Not Call list, and calling after the recipient of the call has clearly expressed a wish not to be called again, is a violation of the law. This is not a debt collector, charity, non-profit organization, nor someone with whom ‘my friend’ has done business in the past. As you discerned, they are auto-dialing numbers.

A lousy economy is not, in my view, an excuse to break the law. Besides, it would be to everyone’s benefit if they stopped calling. I think it has been made clear that they are not going to be successful in selling their product by calling numbers where they can expect to be told to insert their headsets up their recta, so they are wasting their time. If the calls stop, the abuse stops and the irritation leading to the abuse dissipates as well. A win-win.

My question is, is this form of behavior illegal? Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Shodan

14

These people only stop if it costs them money, so maybe your friend knows a lawyer and van ask about suing the bastards, since the state authorities don’t seem interested.

Maybe if your fiend can make a buck, he won’t feek the need to swear. Or better yet, he can sue them AND swear at them.

15

sigh

Note that this article is from two years ago.

Unfortunately…

Regards,
Shodan

16

This seems to be the relevant federal law.

17

I usually ask to be taken out of the system as well since it’s the wrong number, I also add them to my call zapper and very, very rarely seem them re-appear in the list of calls that come in (and I do check fairly often.

In fact, just after I made my last post I got a call that came up as Toll Free Call so instead of answering [Business Name] I answered “Hello.” The person started asking me about credit card processing to which I played dumb and answered all his questions as if he was talking about the credit cards in my pocket. After about 20 seconds he asked if this was [Business Name] and I told him it wasn’t and that he must have the wrong number and that this isn’t a business at all, it’s just my home. He gave me the typical response “Oh, I’m sorry about that, I’ll take you out of our system, but did you know your phone number is listed on [Business Name]'s website?”

I then added him to our call blocker and, like I said before, I’d be surprised if I got another call from that number.

My method of politely asking to be removed because they have the wrong number has been working for years. It sure works better then venting my frustrations on them.

18

[digression]

Thanks for the link! Cervaise’s OP was all kinds of awesome! :D[/digression]

19

Your optimism is uplifting but misplaced - there is no way to resolve this. All you can do is not answer or hang up as soon as you do answer.

I’m picturing this as giving the telemarketer a zap in the ear every time they dial. Mmmmm.

20

From Louisiana:

Nevada statutes 201.255 prohibits three types of speech communicated over the phone–obscene speech, threatening speech, and annoying speech.

Massachusetts Laws Chapter 269 section 14A prohibits telephone or electronic communications that are harassing, annoying, or threatening.

Georgia code title 16, chapter 11, article 2 prohibits the use of “fighting words,” obscene and vulgar or profane language, and harassment over phone calls.

Many more cites are available. Even just look in the front of your phone book (if you have one) and you will see it cited there.