Stop Calling Us

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While technology has greatly expanded the telemarketers' reach, it has also given consumers weapons to fight back. Caller ID--which is used by 38% of U.S. households today, up from 30% in 1998--at first allowed users to detect calls from salespeople and other pests. But telemarketers learned to mask their numbers so that they read as UNAVAILABLE or OUT OF AREA on caller-ID displays, and users often answer because they think the call might be an urgent one from a friend or colleague--an impulse that's especially prevalent in these days of orange alerts.

Major phone companies offer services like SBC's Privacy Manager, which for $5 a month screens calls that don't register on caller ID. Anyone with an anonymous phone number is required to identify herself, and if she's a telemarketer, you can press a button to activate a pre-recorded message telling her not to call again--a request that telemarketers are required under federal law to respect (but one that many nonetheless ignore). "Clearly this is a privacy war, and many times the phone companies are the arms dealers," says Robert Bulmash of Private Citizen Inc., based in Naperville, Ill., which campaigns against telemarketing. Like many arms dealers, the phone companies work both sides of the conflict: they avidly sell their services by phone and also peddle their customers' phone numbers to other telemarketers.

The phone companies face growing competition, though, from products like the $30 Phone Butler, sold by Morgan-Francis Inc., based in Fort Myers, Fla., which performs a function similar to that of the Privacy Manager. A more aggressive approach is touted by Privacy Technologies, based in Glenwillow, Ohio, which developed the TeleZapper. A small black box that connects to any phone, the $40 TeleZapper greets each incoming call with shrill tones that resemble the sound of a disconnected phone. When automatic dialers detect this sound, they often interpret it to mean the number is disconnected and hang up. A downside of this device, though, is that it might cause your mom to do the same. Another problem: some telemarketers have either changed their software or bought new dialers that stay on the line even when they hear the zapper's tones.

You might think--or hope--that telemarketers would eventually run out of workers willing to endure constant rejection and abuse. Think again. Expanding global trade, combined with falling prices for international calls, has allowed telemarketers to move call centers to countries where more pliant employees line up for such work. "In the U.S., to work in a call center is not a very glorifying job," but in countries such as India and Mexico, the white-collar environment and relatively high wages have job applicants lining up, says Robert Fabro, president of Hispanic Call Centers, which oversees phone banks in 62 countries and specializes in reaching immigrant populations in the U.S.