FCC Considering Banning Transfer of Online Consent Forms
tcpaworld.com
tcpaworld.com
I honestly don't understand how this isn't already a thing. The bit about Lending Tree struck a chord with me. I tried it once. I expected offers on the screen. Instead, I immediately received text messages, emails, and phone calls from multiple lenders at the same time. I was furious at every one of them.
> Caught in the middle are the innocent companies trying to sell their legitimate products to interested consumers. They want no part of fraudulent leads or fraudulent lawsuits. They’re just trying to help someone buy a home or get car insurance.
No, not innocent. "Hey, I've got a get rich quick scheme! I'll give you leads for customers, but you have to call them fast before my other customers do!" Nothing innocent about that. You sign up for that, you know exactly what you are doing, and you know damn well it's wrong.
Instead of handing off customer contact info to a dozen different lenders, they can send the loan request to the lenders, and the lenders can send their offers back to lending tree who can then send it to the customer since the customer only authorized lending tree to contact them. Ideally lending tree would consolidate the responses so instead of a dozen txt messages, the customer receives a single one from lending tree.
In short - you are defining control differently than they do and coming to a different conclusion. You can do that, but expect vendors to be unmoved by it.
Could it be done that way? Sure! This just comes with the caveat that finding lenders willing to do it might be harder and they would likely pay less per-lead. So a higher volume would be required to make financial ends meet for the broker, who also is now developing and deploying more sophisticated software in addition to the whole sales funnel and marketing operation.
You may be thinking "Gee, this is great for everyone except the customer". Yes, it is. It sucks for the customer who gets spammed by a dozen lenders.
There's a large part of me that doesn't care what the vendors think. Their attitude toward potential customers is a not insignificant part of the problem.
I suppose if you have really bad credit these places might find someone willing to do a risky loans (at really bad interest rates) while the local banks and credit unions won't talk to you at all. However overall the places buying leads don't have anything to offer.
They are not providing the capital, they are not making money through interest. They have almost no control over the rates they offer you.
They make money when a borrower signs a new loan agreement (origination) and by collecting the payments the borrower owes and passing them along to the real lender (servicing).
If you're wondering why your mortgage company used to keep calling you telling you to refinance (and some still are, even with the higher rates), it's because that's another loan origination for them - another payment. They don't care that you save long term on the interest, they want the payment for closing a new loan.
Same for loan consolidation (ex: consolidate your auto/credit debts!) style pitches. They're ONLY interested in originating a new loan, because that's how they get paid.
----
Basically - these guys don't have anything other than you, the borrower.
They're not selling you a loan, they're selling you to real lender, which is almost always the large government backed mortgage lenders (Freddie/Fannie).
This is why they jump to call you, or text you, or harass you. They are out there fishing for new borrowers to make money.
Hot leads are very valuable, especially in the pay-per-call space. Every single one of those calls the GP is complaining about likely "reached duration" and paid out to Tree. Hehe.
I work in a bank now, and we can calculate interest rate, understand consumer default profiles, calculate acceptable risk ratio for our own capital, all those stuff that have to do with loans.
Point is, you cannot expect an externalized marketing department to do what you suggest. They dont care about borrowers one bit, lending is not their jobs. Banks just want to start a relationship with people and send whatever they can to whomever present an email adress, and they ll pay their marketing guys by the amount of converted leads.
Might not stay that way now the EU laws are potentially getting ripped up.
Currently, organisations can claim both consent and legitimate interests as a legal basis so it is already possible to take my data from somewhere, pass it to other people and have those third-parties contact you.
"Legitimate Interests" was presumably some attempt to allow things like research and things that hadn't been thought of elsewhere but this leaves a nasty loophole that is already being taken advantage of.
In fact, some cookie consent banners, if you click "options", disable the consent tickbox by default but leave "legitiimate interests" ticked in some kind of dark pattern to imply that "we'd rather have your consent but we don't need it".
(GDPR is UK's implementation of an EU directive, the kind of law that the Retained EU Law bill seeks to get rid of.)
I don't see anything in there that would revoke the DPA, though. It even requires DPA-compatibility at one point, so to avoid recursion I imagine it won't be for that purpose.
https://www.itpro.co.uk/policy-legislation/data-protection/3...
Allstate called before I had even completed the online application, and proceeded to call at least once a day until the number expired.
Geico called once.
Progressive didn't call at all. AND they were cheapest. You can guess who I went with.
Everyone seems to have horror stories about ALL the companies out there.
Likely because of the intense advertising they do. Every other YouTube as is liberty mutual for me. I have had Amica for years and have no horror stories. They are great, and offer an annual dividend.
Fast forward a few months and I get my renewal letter in the mail - my 6-month premium went up 47% for no particular stated reason. I’m basically ending up paying for the repair over the course of the next year and a half.
I’m currently in search of the highest deductible, lowest premium insurer I can find, because I’m never going to file a claim again unless a car is a near total loss.
With car insurance, it’s all about price in most states. You should be shopping annually if you want to optimize for price. That may vary in a place like New Hampshire or Florida that is more lax from a regulatory perspective - cheap insurance there may be too cheap.
Age, car, history, address tend to matter. As a boring 40 something, I’m paying less for $0 deductible, $1M limit insurance than I did for a 100/300 $2500 deductible 10 years ago. If you drive a Tesla, live in Brooklyn and have moving violations, forget it.
Florida allows minimum coverage as low as $10k in liability. They also like collecting fees and are very lax in enforcement for passenger cars for plates, etc. Thats why you’ll see hooptie mobiles with Florida plates all over the place.
This is why you need to have enough insurance. If you make a mistake (odds are you will), you want enough money such that you can pay off whoever you wronged without it killing the rest of your life.
Saving a few bucks with car insurance is rolling the dice with your 401k!
A bit of a market failure there if the insurance being purchased is only or primarily liability.
But I have a bad taste in my mouth about the insurance industry in general, so color me jaded.
Most I've seen is just terrible ancedata.
This is a good starting point, but not the only one:
https://clark.com/insurance/car-insurance/best-auto-insuranc...
No affiliate links and no kick backs taken by Clark Howard.
https://clark.com/insurance/car-insurance/best-auto-insuranc...
No affiliate links and no kick backs taken by Clark Howard.
Talk about dark patterns! Now I never put my email/phone until I am to hit submit (or maybe I should continue as normal to know the scammy companies).
The fact that you fill in a form signals 'intent to buy' and that makes those leads worth a lot of money. The only way they can make that work is if they sell the lead as soon as possible after you've filled it out because of the competitive nature of the market. So that's exactly what they do: sell it to multiple parties at once. It's a terrible model and one of the reasons why as soon as some online calculator is broken up into multiple steps I already know where it's headed: the last form will ask for my email address to mail the offer to and my phone number for verification. I simply abandon the process at that point, and I hope their funnel analysis tells them that story a million times a day.
Trip planning sites may sell leads to companies, but they don’t have to for the system to work. They have taken a different route to getting you a deal on a product.
That's...not specific to leadgen.
Lead generation firms care about their customers - but their customers are not the users, it is the people buying the leads. This disconnect is why they don't care.
You get the same problem at ad supported companies (news, social media...). For a long time news papers had careful public policies in places to separate the editorial side from the ad side, so they could be independent. Many advertisers hated it because the editors they were paying did things against them - but they put up with it because those editors brought in the readers of the ads. That has broken down in the modern age though.
That drastically changes the meaning of the title.
The one-at-a-time request is from an outside advocacy group Public Knowledge ( which calls itself a "free expression" group, but doesn't want free expression for advertisers... ")
> I'll give you leads for customers, but you have to call them fast before my other customers do!"
Why is incentivizing prompt customer service bad, or any kind of scheme? Competition drives better performance.
At Google there was a poster that read, "For every search there is the perfect Ad" and someone had written on it, "most times that is no ad at all." which lasted for maybe a week and a half before it was taken down.
So often there is no "value" to the person doing the action, the "value" is between the web site and the people who want to get information about you.
Someone came along and added a note “do you have appropriate permission to reproduce this image?” And if I recall, both parts stayed up indefinitely.
There is value in saying "here's the number of a guy I know and trust". Curating options is valuable. Basically you need to be a honest broker: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...
There is also value in preparing leads with good information, filtering out tire kickers, and abstracting marketing or billing away. Some people want to work on their craft without thinking about SEO and the like.
For example, I work with people I trust to take over when the information on my website is not enough. "This is all I know. If you need a lawyer, call Fiona, she helped me a lot and I trust her advice". For some of the people I recommend, I get a kickback. As I see it, everyone in this transaction gains something.
Do you disclose this?
Eg., suppose a pipe breaks, you search for plumber, you find a plumber. That search is a lead generator for that plumber.
That search is "free", by intuition, kinda destroys our sense of value in lead generation, right? Google should NOT be free for that plumber; the plumber should be paying quite a lot for the service.
Suppliers of services need a system which allocates demand, right? Indeed, customers need a system of finding suppliers.
The best result is almost never the ad. And in the rare situation where there ad is the best result, it’s an inefficiency because the poor plumber is paying for an unnecessary ad.
We’re hitting a point where we always get shitty plumbers because they have good ads and don’t need to be good plumbers. Or even worse, most plumber ads are just lead generation where I get some random plumber driving 90 minutes because they bought the lead and responded first.
I’d rather be in a world where the search surfaced the best plumber. Not some arbitrating middleman sucking value away from the plumber and the person with a backed up toilet.
The search itself has to be paid for; the search itself is lead generation. The search is the "middle man".
Who is paying for google search?
But that makes the service into an ad. The last thing I'm going to do is take any recommendations from someone who is being paid to give recommendations.
Without that, they lose the users thst drive revenue.
I get a ton of spam texts, every day. Not quite as bad as the spoofed robocalls, and a mere shadow of the email spam I get (which suddenly exploded, so I guess they figured out how to get past the low-level gatekeepers).
The legit folks sell you to the non-legit folks, then say “I’m not responsible for what they do with it!”
I logged every call I made to them, during many of which they swore they'd stop it. Eventually they started claiming that they couldn't. I had to block AT&T's number on my phone.
How execrably stupid do they have to be to send "everything's fine" texts over and over and over instead of, at the very most, sending an E-MAIL?
I'm from a first world country in Europe and I can count the number of spam calls I got over the years on one hand (literally 2).
Same goes for spam texts (3).
For legal reasons my phone number could be found on the open web for years.
With a fairly wealthy population (by world standard) and a language spoken by ~100 million people there should be ample opportunities to spam people.
Yet even my parents whose number were listed in the phone book get maybe 1 or two spam calls per year
Amount of scam calls I've ever received can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. There was this time that scam texts (usually trying to impersonate either a bank or PostNL) were common, but I haven't received one in quite a while.
Most disturbing were the energy company salespeople that would actually ring the door, and somehow knew _exactly_ how large my consumption was.
Europe is rich, but you have to spam in 20 languages so you’ll make less money.
Having Android block or flag spam calls automatically was a godsend, even nontechnical people are looking into that feature now.
I do get three to four phonecalls from spoofed UK numbers every month. I havn't picked up for a year or so, but last time I did, it was a fake "Microsoft Support" scam.
Because we loudly and openly tell everyone we are a very gullible people. It's all over the news, what with "stolen elections", etc.
Also stuff like credit stores not being as much of a thing meaning that there's not really a whole gamut of offerings. If everyone is offering roughly the same rates there's not much of a business for shopping around
GDPR outlawed large parts of that.
The author clearly thinks that business can only exist if you annoy the prospect until they buy to make you go away. There are other, more customer friendly business models.
It works for turning on my wifi even when I don’t want to. There are so many settings I enable just to make the nagware go away.
I only access google properties through chrome for this same reason. There’s no way to tell google “I know that chrome exists, I don’t like it, I’m comfortable with my browser.” other than just using chrome.
It seems to me that so many companies are sure of themself so much that no one would ever choose not to do the thing they want. Or they’ve decided they don’t care that it sucks, they’ll do it anyway to make money.
Not that the behaviour isn't Annoying As Eff and anticompetitive to boot.
It’s frustrating and there’s no way to get off their list. It’s always new companies too.
I’d pay $5 each for an AI honeypot that just occupies their time by talking with them and emailing them to waste their time until this becomes unprofitable.
https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/national-do-not-call-regis...
The exception is when they have paid knockers instead of volunteers. It’s so sad for the people and the candidate who thinks that somehow helps their chances.
Most of the spam makes me even less likely to vote for that person.
Many of them want me to click on Columbian links. For American politics. And, I presume, enter stuff about my political beliefs into the other end. … yeah, no thanks?
I get that there are people who's business model is buying contact information and claiming the sellers of that information gained a blanket consent to spam that contact, but I don't know a single person - who doesn't make money from spamming people - who has ever wanted that.
I also appreciate the euphemism of "lead generation" rather than spammer.
For what it’s worth, whenever one of those “lead generator”-type calls gets past my filters, I take their number and the number of whatever company they’re advertising and sign both of them up to a bunch of those lead generator websites
Don't the spammers spoof innocent people's numbers? If so, you're probably punishing someone unrelated.
Oh, they do? I wasn’t aware this was a thing. I’ll only sign up the business from now on.
I'm sure there's a more complexity in how this actually all works in the real world, but this is my basic high level understanding of it.
But the “good uses” actually had been a win for small and local businesses. With too much real and fake content online for directories to be practical, lead generation sites became a successor to the yellow pages for a lot of small businesses.
Users look for a masseuse or roofer, fill out a qualifier form at a lead generation site operated by a tech company, and the business operators who may not even have a website can qualify the lead and submit a pitch.
They weren’t perfect and are still subject to abuse, but they were a working solution for a lot of people who weren’t going to (and don’t really need to) build an impressive website and marketing strategy.
But like I said, stuff happens and times change, so if that system gets tossed for the sake of all the adjacent abuse, so be it. I’m sure some new technique will fill the underlying niche.
Instead they'd have to send information to the contractors, the contractors would have to submit quotes or whatever information back, then the "lead generator" would send said info to the customer in one email, text, etc. that the customer could then call/opt-in to calls with specific contractors.
These are fantastic changes. I can’t wait. If public support is needed seems like that wouldn’t be hard to drum up.
His public position, probably mostly genuine, is that there are good guys and bad guys and he helps protect the good guys from getting hit with tools meant for the bad guys.
Here, he laments that the good guys might get screwed by upcoming regulation and need to speak up and make sure there are carve outs for them.
Sigh.
Thanks.
Disincentivizing this niche of marketing and driving companies to invest and build their own effective leads generators in-house is better for literally everyone but lawyers in the "leads generation industry."
Yes, and I think he's genuine about that. That's how he sleeps at night.
But the reality is that there are bad guys and worse guys.
The reality of course is that all text message spammers are bad actors, just less bad than the worst of the worst. It is probably is true that failure to self-regulate is what brought this down on the industry, but the industry as a whole deserves it and everyone will be happy to see it gone, except for the unscrupulous handful who make a profit off of it.
Hopefully it will change.
Ah, yes. The innocent companies!
Like those that lapped up ill-gotten leads from Facebook until consumers could actually choose not to have their habits collated and sold off.
Companies will look the other way so long as the leads are cheap enough and result in sales.
For example if I contact someone about long-distance transport of a vehicle I end up with dozens of calls and emails from companies claiming to be drivers all of whom will do it for the lowest price. Over time I select one of these companies or find another somewhere else. However, it can take months for the contacts to taper off with the email spam being the last thing to shut down. It is obvious that you only need to contact one company thru their website in order to get on the list of potential customers so they all sell contact info to each other. The last time I got an email reminding me that they are ready to transport my vehicle it had been two years since that vehicle was transported to me. This stale contact info has to be a drag on the system somewhere. I just mark all as spam and forget about it.
I feel like it’s square that’s driving this. I’ll buy a coffee or something small and immediately be signed up for that businesses email list. No consent, no option not to be emailed. Just automatically marketed to bc I swiped my card at their checkout.
Square is who got me to stop using credit cards to buy things.
I bought something at a Square terminal, and opted for no receipt. The next time I bought something at a square terminal, I noticed that they had my email address prefilled in their "email my receipt" selection.
I'd never given them my email address. I was pissed. What followed was a week of harassing Square to try to get them to delete their records about me. They eventually said they did, but I don't know if they were truthful because I stopped using my card, so couldn't check.
it is nuts how salespeople view themselves. they're the heroes who drive business, they're the backbone of the economy, etc.
anyone negatively impacted by the banning of online consent forms is doing shady shit in the first place.
There are no downsides to killing the bad actors here.
But the idea that regulating spam calls and online consent transfer is the leads apocalypse is laughable.
Here's a thing about people -- we all consider ourselves the heroes of our own stories. It's just human nature.
<< they're the backbone of the economy
In US selling is absolutely the backbone of the economy. Granted, it is often selling crap and/or bs, but it is still selling.
All that said, 'lead generation industry' is not sales. Sales is people who use those leads. I just want to make sure we are clear on the distinction.
Just because harassment is involved in much of our economic transactions doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t buy stuff in a world without harassment. It’s just like cutting in line: all it does is change who gets first (for the worse), it doesn’t impact the flow of traffic overall.
This guy and his mantra for saving the "leads generation industry" is comedy. Or marketing. I'm not sure which.
you're right; I forgot that it is impossible for money to change hands without a salesman in there somewhere.
One of our data scientists determined that the sketchy lead sales were a net negative to a customer’s lifetime value. Assurance IQ kept doing it because it makes (less) money faster.
It built a whole marketplace around this junk: https://www.gonectar.com
The former CEO did it to make quick money. Current leadership sticks with it out of ineptitude.
Something like 12 out of the last 13 quarters were unprofitable.
I just have a bone to pick with all this software using phone numbers as ID or notifications. Send an email where we can filter it or if you must, do an app with notifications I can tune to my liking.
SMS is almost always the one I see first, but they seem to use it as just one layer in a reliability sandwich.
Every once in a while, someone will send a text that takes multiple days to get to me, but that's about the only glitch I see.
For years, we were able to get away with email to sms addresses but they have become undependable as the carriers are blocking them more and more; likely because of the amount of spam going out.
Its trivial, but it's so fucking annoying that I've visualized doing violent things as I hit unsubscribe.
The volume is low enough for now that I still add each sender's domain to our Exchange online's mail flow rules to block with a rejection message to the effect of "The recipient has deliberately blocked cold contact messages from senders such as yourself. Please remove the recipient from your mailing lists.". It brings me great satisfaction to know that going forward system f-off messages are being sent to these people with zero extra effort, or even knowledge on my part.
Gartner tells you what you probably already knew them sells your information.
The email addresses are removed a couple of weeks after the conference ends, which gives everyone time to give their actual email addresses to anyone who contacts them that they want to keep talking with.
I have no idea why but I laughed out loud at this sentence.
LeadsCon? Really?
[ Surrender To The Marketing Dept. ]
[ Maybe Later ]
[ Show Me Less Dialogs Like This* ]
* Surrenders to the marketing department.
Here is a tidbit of insight: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405850570267-N...
It was very clear that one organization was doing both sides
I had a neighbor who owned a common .com for housing construction that was top seo and all it did was collect your info and sell the lead. I had actually used it before I met my neighbor and hated it. He ran it in the least scammy way possible, but it still boiled down to having a bunch of contractors call and email me and the experience was bad.
I think phone calls should be run like apple does push notifications. Someone who doesn’t care (apple) confirms you want them and provides a simple way to turn them off when you no longer want them.
I’ve had very few spam push messages and never two from the same org as I just block them.
Texts and calls should be similar. Agreeing to be contacted by one vendor and then getting stuff forever from anyone that vendor sells to is ridiculous.
It’s absolutely hilarious seeing the begging and the coping from this guy as he desperately tries to persuade us that consumers need fraudlent call centres to live their lives. Nah, I think I’m alright thanks.
We thought the ancients were cruel and heartless but here we are signing forms we cannot comprehend and using them as a basis for denying people legal protections.
> There’s another problem too– professional plaintiffs (and their lawyers) exploit the abuses in the industry and fill out forms by the barrelful to set up TCPA lawsuits. These days it is REALLY hard to tell the difference between lead fraud and litigator fraud until you are deep into a case.
Burn it all to the ground.
My # is on the do not call list. Guess how much that helps...
Different situation: 2 years ago, I needed to move across the country. My dad decided to help and so he put my phone # into a website to give you a quote for moving. I was instantly inundated by calls from multiple moving companies, all of which sounded "off", all from that one form. (BTW, several of these companies were out of Florida. Just do a quick online search for florida moving company scams.) As a final note, it was cheaper to rent a truck from Penske and hire a friend to drive it the 1,000 miles. And, in case you care, Penske was $1,000 less than U-Haul and had better guarantees... I strongly recommend them!
What I really want is mandatory opt-in to be able to contact me.
Unknown numbers get to send a single standard length SMS, carrier embeds the full legal name and, for businesses, legally registered mailing address, and I can choose whether to accept. If I don't, no other contact from that number is connected to my phone. Ever.
I can also report the message as unsolicited and every company's unsolicited contact stats are made available to regulators.
If I get a call, email, or text from a business that bought my name, they need to include payment in the message of the same amount they paid the lead generator, whether I end up using their service or not. If not, their message goes straight to the spam folder and I never see it.
You gotta pay to bypass my filter.
Works every time. They know what it means.