For the Last Time: I'm not Interested!!

They call your phone at random hours, often multiple times a week, or worse, a day. Their numbers are often disconnected when you call back. And, they never leave a message.

These are the telemarketers.

I'm sure we've all received calls from them, and I'd be willing to bet that the general American population shares a rather mutual disliking of them. After all, who wouldn't dislike a person who spams your phone with unnecessary calls that usually end up causing more trouble than they're worth?

So, what exactly is telemarketing? Typically, it's seen as a method of commercial selling that is conducted over the phone rather than face-to-face with the salesperson calling the consumer. Recently, though, the term "telemarketer" has been expanded to also include phone scams. These phone scams are perhaps even more annoying and most certainly more dangerous than regular telemarketers.

Phone scams are usually target the poor or the elderly. They'll make some claim, like the person has won some money or something similar, and say that they need to pay a fee before they can receive their prize money. Sound suspicious? You betcha. The sad thing is, thousands of people fall victim to scams like this, ultimately getting themselves placed on a sucker list. The person will then be flooded with emails, letters and phone calls for even more scams, and usually end up getting sucked back into yet another scam.

Now, once upon a time, telemarketing was limited to just household phones... landlines, if you will. However, the rise of mobile communication, such as cell phones, has led to people like telemarketers or scam artists getting even more numbers, and worse, direct communication. For instance, I remember when I was a little girl, my mom or dad ended up answering the phone all the time. They dealt with the telemarketers, and were able to protect our house from them. Less than 10 years later, most of our family has cellphones, and now we're getting calls to our respective phones. What used to be a household nuisance has now become a personal problem.

So, what exactly can be done about these annoying people? Well, one of the first things you can do is register your phone number on the National Do Not Call list. You can register by phone or online. It'll take about a month for it to fully take effect, but after that, you should see the number of telemarketing calls you receive lowered significantly.

But what if you receive a call and want to find out where it's from? Well, there's a lot of online sites that'll allow you to search for numbers. Some will even let you write a complaint. Sites like this include callferret.com, callercomplaints.com and whocallsme.com.

While I doubt telemarketing will end anytime soon, at least people have a way to combat the annoying calls. Hopefully in the future we won't have to deal with aggravations like these. In the meantime, use common sense when dealing with them, and you should be fine.

Sources:
http://caeaudio.com/callsystem.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemarketer

https://www.donotcall.gov/