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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

We have a similar list in America [1] and Canada [2]. Unfortunately, like any regulation, its efficacy is only as good as its enforcement, so my understanding is they're both routinely ignored. Particularly grim for the Canadian case -

> In January 2009, numerous media and consumer advocacy organizations reported that anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer and download a set of numbers from the list for a $50 fee. It took their reporter ten minutes to do so. It has been proposed that list may be being downloaded and used as a telemarketing list overseas, where there's little that can be done as the CRTC has no jurisdiction outside of Canada

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_Registry [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List

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From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.

And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.

> From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.

Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.

Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.

I think the point is that there is a distinction between calls that are intrusive spam or arguably scams but not already illegal, and calls where the content of the call is itself unambiguously illegal.

Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.

A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.

100% agree. When I said scam above, I meant the obviously illegal fraudulent scams (like the "We're MS, and see you have a virus, please give us your CC info and let us remote into your desktop" stuff).

Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.

The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.

In this context they're not the same thing. Calls from companies legitimately operating in the country need to obey laws or face enforcement (ideally, unless the government is asleep at the wheel) while calls from scammers outside of the country are breaking a bunch of laws anyways so who cares about violating a do not call list.

I consider marketing is a plague on attention and view it highly negatively - but in the case of tools to reduce unwanted phone calls there are some real differences in what's available to legitimate vs. scam callers and a do not call list can only ever be effective against people working within the system.

Some politician reached out to ask me what he would need to do to get my vote:

I replied, "Stop providing politicians exemption to spam constituents." Strangely, they didn't respond.

this experience will vary per region, telco and carrier network. some filter more advanced than others and some regions have more telemarketing than others based on the metrics they pull from it.

i get mostly robocalls from scam centres in india. most are filtered but some go through. 0 telemarketing.

The carve out for political solicitation is particularly egregious.

The US and Canada also already have an outright ban on auto dialing and telemarketing calls to cellphones.

There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.

> anyone can use false information pretending to be a telemarketer

I suppose many people would wonder what the difference is between a legitimate caller you don't want and a fake one.

From context they mean pretending to be a legitimate law-abiding telemarketer who plans to use the do not call list for screening purposes when in fact they are an overseas telemarketer who plans to use the list as a cheap set of known working phone numbers.

If you have a policy of never giving these people the time of day, then it's no different

If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference

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