Stop Calling Us

Six

-thirty p.m. is a sacred time in American life, but one also often filled with dread. Mom and Dad are home from work, Junior's back from piano and Sis from soccer, and everyone's washed up and ready to eat. We count on dinner as the family hour yet know that at any moment it could be punctured by a phone call from some scripted stranger hawking island vacations or aluminum siding.

If the number of intrusive sales calls you receive seems to be on the rise, that's because it is. Revenue from telemarketing pitches increased 250% from 1990 to 2002, to $295 billion, and is growing today even amid an economy that's flat. Salespeople this year will place 100 million calls daily to homes and businesses, and those who get on hot-prospect lists — usually by buying something — can easily get half a dozen calls a day. The greater call volume means higher blood pressure for most Americans and more bitterly clever responses to the question, "May I speak with [your mispronounced name here], please?"

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Consumers are buying gadgets with names like Phone Butler and TeleZapper to help keep unwanted salespeople at bay. But the callers keep developing new technologies to defeat the gadgets. Federal and state legislators are passing laws to tighten regulation of telemarketers. President Bush recently signed a bill authorizing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to create a national do-not-call registry, which anyone can sign up for online beginning July 1 and by phone soon thereafter. Eventually the list will be merged with similar lists maintained by 30 states — a chore that may take up to two years. Companies must begin using the list by Oct. 1. But there are big asterisks in the federal law, which, for instance, exempts from regulation telemarketers for charities and political candidates. And those can be among the most aggressive callers. Last month Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders were dialing for contributions to aid victims of the Iraq war as soon as President Bush finished his prewar address.

You may pride yourself on never buying anything from a telemarketer — or even letting one finish a sentence. But enough of your neighbors and colleagues respond to phone pitches to make it a lucrative business. Home repairers, mortgage refinancers, long-distance providers and, we should point out, popular magazines like this one have found phone pitches to be among their most cost-effective sales tools. U.S. consumers also unwittingly hand over as much as $50 billion a year to fraudulent callers, who make pleas for phony charities or offer prizes with strings attached or cheap vacations with hidden fees.

Telemarketing has been around almost as long as the telephone, but it didn't take off until the 1980s brought a decline in long-distance prices, along with a powerful technology called the automatic dialer. This device can call hundreds of homes at the same time and then immediately route the unwitting customer to a live telemarketer. When you answer your phone at home and hear nothing but light static, it's often because an automatic dialer has reached you but no agent was free to take the call. An unlisted number used to provide protection, until digital technology allowed marketers to easily gather lists of consumers who have given their numbers to credit-card companies or others with which they do business.

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.