Speaking from personal experience, I’ve never had a telemarketer call my cell phone. My land line gets calls all the time, but my cell phone never does. Is there a reason for this? Do phone companies not allow this for fear of wasting our minutes? If they do, why didn’t they help us out with our land lines when we needed them? Any ideas?
personal experience:
mr. Glargh gets telemarketers on his celly all the time. More often than not, he buys stuff from them also. >.<
I’ve also gotten a few calls… BASTARDS!
I don’t know about the US, but in Japan there’s a big problem with what are called ‘wangiri’ (one-cut) calls on mobile phones. The telescum call the number, then hang up after the first ring, so they don’t get charged with any fee. Their number, however, is picked up by the phone’s caller ID (standard equipment). The hope is that the receiver will see they’ve been called and then call back, so the telescum not only gets a hit, they get the customer to pay for it. Usually these calls are advertising ‘date clubs’ or other sexual services. I don’t know if it’s legal for the ‘1-900’ style numbers to do this to trick people into calling them. I’ve heard conflicting accounts of this.
To get around this, I (and most other people) have programmed my phone with the names of all the people who have any reason to know my mobile number. If I see I’ve been called, but there’s no name and no message, I don’t bother calling back.
The FCC says:
IOW, it’s illegal in the US for telemarketers to place an unsolicited call to a cellphone. They keep track of which exchanges are assigned to cell carriers.
I only have a cell phone now (no landline) and receive no telemarketing calls whatsoever.
friedo, how do you know that it’s illegal for telemarketers to call a cellular telephone? The only information I ever saw was the one in my previous post, that you can’t use an autodialer.