France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week | Hacker News Reader

France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week

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137 pointsgeox57 comments

Australia banned telemarketing a while ago, it worked pretty well. The only spam phone calls left are 100% illegal scammers.

https://www.acma.gov.au/telemarketing-and-e-marketing they give out million+ dollar fines which sort things out. Just being a customer doesn't allow them to send marketing, you have to opt in.

It's the year 2026, I refuse to believe that phone companies cannot figure out who is a scammer and who is not.

If financial incentives align, we will be surprised how effective they would become.

Many scammers use internet telephony to call someone and some even spoof the caller id. In India, the mobile companies request subscribers to report any international call which shows local spoofed caller ids to them, so they can investigate it. So I am guessing it is trickier than we believe to track them ...

Can they at least flag calls as being from voip?

If it is local, they probably can. But VoIP being international is the problem. See Why in the year of our lord 2022 am I still getting robocalls??? - https://www.vox.com/recode/22882647/robocalls-robotexts-scam... ...

Unfortunately it's paywalled, but... International in which way? The actual connection from the voip system to the POTS must be inside the country I thought. And if it's not, there has to be some telco-operated gateway to whichever country it's in. Sure the end person using it is in another country connecting via internet, but there must be some local entity to go after.

I get if it's hard to figure out who's a scammer, but can't they at least figure out who is calling? And if the other end can't prove that it owns that number, they don't get to call me.

Also, getting SMS from email addresses. Nobody asked for that feature, please nuke it.

You can ban these practices as much as you want, but what we really need is ENFORCING. I have to be able to report a phone number that called me, and have them either fined or blocked at the national level for spam.

We have that in France already it is called bloctel

Bloctel is becoming obsolete due to this change.

What's the status of discounts granted in exchange for marketing consent? Because that's how they bait many older consumers into receiving these calls.

Marketing consent is granted via sweepstakes.

It happened in Spain months ago. Then the "marketers" start calling from international phone numbers.

Let them pay international rates. One dollar a minute, eh?

If they're calling from within the EU then a cross-country judgement is still enforceable, so I assume they aren't doing that.

Is it though in practice?

"International rates" aren't a thing anymore since the advent of VOIP. It doesn't matter whether you're connecting from France or Fiji, with VOIP you pay the same rate.

There are three kinds of VOIP you could be talking about.

The first kind sends your call out from a local number in the country you're calling to. So someone in France has a French number, and you can use it following French local tariffs + a bit. The owner of this number would be prosecuted if he didn't cooperate with enforcing the law.

The second way is that you use IP to connect to your own country's PSTN. Normal international rates apply.

The third is that you use a platform like WhatsApp with no relation to the PSTN. In this case I don't know how the law applies.

The fourth kind (which you are not talking about) is that your PSTN carrier privately uses IP to connect to the French PSTN carrier but it looks like PSTN on both sides.

At least in the US, VOIP providers (think google voice or twilio) interconnect with telephone companies similar to how landline/cellphone companies interconnect with each other, so #1 and #4 are essentially the same. The only difference is what the "from" number appears as. If you look at the price lists of voip providers, you'll note that the only factor that determines the price is where you're calling to, not where you're calling from.

That provider is either only providing service to one country (very likely because this is separately regulated in every country), is showing you prices specific to your country, or is doing #1 and making themselves liable for spam.

>That provider is either only providing service to one country (very likely because this is separately regulated in every country),

twilio can hardly be described as "providing service to one country", and has the same price list whether I'm using an American VPN or Dutch VPN:

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/voice/pricing/fr

You see how it says "local"? That means a local call.

That doesn't make any sense when you look at the other options, one of which is "Mobile calls", but no "long distance" or "foreign" option. Moreover twilio operates over the internet. There's no concept of "local" on the internet. The concept of long distance only really exists for landlines and cell phones, but even in the latter case it gets blurred because of wifi calling. You could have a SIM for a US carrier but be using wifi calling from hong kong, and that would still be a "local" call.

Exactly, no long distance or foreign option. So these must be local calls, meaning they are made from a French twilio number to a French number.

>So these must be local calls

No, you're just reading too much into "local". The price page for US also only has "local" only, but I know for a fact that "long distance" calls work fine.

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/voice/pricing/us

So you called yourself from a French Twilio number and got a French caller ID and got billed the local US rate?

International rates are just a consumer thing.

Explain how this can exist concurrently on the front page with this, then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183953

That's very different, that's a "botnet" style where you leverage consumer hardware and use them without their knowledge, similar to how you'd run a botnet farm for residential proxies (what Perplexity and so-on are using).

There is many ways of doing spam/fraud, think also that some are not very clever nor have good financial literacy, they just don't know the best mechanisms due to lack of education in tech (and the dark side).

For example, some would pay an infected residential network for $5 per GB, and some will only pay $0.10 per GB, depending on how knowledgeable they are.

Most calls/bulk SMS can be done cheaply by just buying Stolen VoIP enterprise accounts (available on a ton of forums), a "scam" operation will resort to any way possible because they don't have any law affecting them as they do so already illegally, it's not the same as "marketing calls".

Then most people can just block all international numbers. Hope to see phone number whitelisting soon.

AHH is that why I get so many international calls?

Also the energy company scammers in Spain are still going strong. Even on local numbers.

what does HN think are the better alternatives to cold contact?

businesses obviously keep doing unsolicited telemarketing calls because it works to some extent

Does there have to be a alternative? Companies preying on the elderly and uninformed is not something we necessarily need as a society. (99% of my telemarketing calls are scams where they pretend to represent my current power company to get me to sign a contract with a different company).

Build a product worth purchasing.

There does not need to be an alternative. It just needs to stop.

selling fentanyl works pretty well too from a business perspective

Most unsolicited telemarketing is inefficient--and that means a high cost of making the sale, which means whatever they are offering is either too expensive, too low quality, or an outright scam.

Wasting the telemarketers' time

Annoying tons of people so some small percent buys your stuff is a shitty thing to do. Their winning more than they lose from being shitty isn't something we have to offer an alternative to.

There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to, or has had previous dealings with. Many will be unsolicited but not all will be.

Many of these calls are coming out of the Third World countries which are barely regulated in this regard, so good luck with enforcing it.

> There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to

Pretty much exactly how it is in Switzerland. I once had a rather unpleasant experience with my old internet provider (Sunrise) where I asked the telemarketer who called me not to do so again, and was told they "had a right to do so, because I was a customer". I immediately cancelled, quoting this as the reason why (Sunrise would later try to tell me this never happened, but that's another story).

With that said, I think it does make a difference: if some random company calls, they can't lose my business because they don't have it; if a company I am a customer with calls and refuses to stop when I ask them to, they risk losing my business. I don't know if this is the reason why, but I barely get any telemarketing calls (never heard of anyone else here who has either).

Another moment of potential irritation: companies being bought out or losing their network supplier giving that third company a business relationship with you.

Which is why nowadays I never take calls if the prefix is from a country I don't have connections with, it is private, or doesn't map to any of my contacts.

If it is someone that I actually know, they will be aware how to actually reach me.

If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)

There was a time I had a scheduled job interview and got two spam calls from the same area code as the interviewer 2 minutes before. The third time, I hung up on the actual interviewer.

I paid for a spam call blocking service about twenty years ago. The annoying thing is not only did it fail to prevent the spam calls from abroad, when someone was trying to call me from Germany it wouldn't let the call through.

Companies aren't allowed to do cold calling in my country. Wiped out an entire industry and nobody wept.

Scams are not what I would define as "telemarketing" though.

It would be helpful to know your country in this thread.

I'd like to see forced legislation requiring marketers to disclose the exact source and campaign they acquired your data in.

I've been getting a barage of non-stop harassment via unwanted magazine subscriptions. People Inc claims some company called "Subco" signed me up and won't allow me to cancel, only "Subco" can do that. "Subco" then claims they got my information from someone else down the line. They then blame someone else, someone else...

... and I still have no clue who the hell decided to sign me up for 20 magazines in the mail.

Yup. Someone clearly scraped my LinkedIn and sold the info as a bogus lead, I've been getting several texts/day about business financing, and the occasional call. Ironically, the calls were better--every caller understood they had bad data and never tried again.

In my experience most of these came from France itself or from Italy. Not exactly third world, eh?

Other person should've specified, the person calling is in a third-world country but they're dialing from inside via some voip service. So then what I don't get is, can't they go after the voip services?

A lot of the ones here appear to have originated in India, which had a major regulation problem for a while (although I think the Indian government has begun to deal with it.) A lesser proportion were from countries in Africa.

This could be dealt with in the U.S. with simple enforcement, but would also limit political parties soliciting by phone and that is my conspiracy theory for why it isn't enforced. It is trivial to find the VoIP providers that are providing the numbers to these telemarketing companies. NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administrator) has a tool for finding them. https://nanpa.com/sites/default/files/2025-03/InstructionsFo...

Make c5 great again <3

They should do the same here in Spain and not just for consumers but B2B as well.

I get several sales people bugging me on email and LinkedIn per day. Of course I block them all but it just sickens me.

Good!

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