Phone Pests

This morning I was awakened early by two phone calls in quick succession.

The first was from Lloyd's of London, delivering the thrilling news that I had won $850,000 in the Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes.

This made me think of my child's favorite phrase at age 6:  "Yeah, right."

I hung up the phone.

The second call was from a magazine, soliciting a subscription.

I hung up again.

Thoroughly awake by then, and much earlier than I wanted to be, I considered the situation.  Unwanted calls have become the norm.  Most of the time when I answer the phone these days, a telemarketer or robocall program is on the other end.

No wonder people text so much.

What, I wondered, happened to the Do Not Call registry?

Remember that?  More than 10 years ago, the federal government established a new program that collected the phone numbers of people who didn't want to receive crap calls.  People loved the idea.  By the end of last year, more than 223 million phone numbers had been registered.

But the annoying calls didn't stop.  Now there are more than ever.

Last year, the program released its biennial report.  The first sentence was this:  "The National Do Not Call Registry provides consumers with an easy and efficient way to register their preference not to receive" . . . blah blah blah.

Yeah, right.

We are supposed to phone up the Do Not Call line to report abuses, and there were 3.75 million such complaints logged in 2013.  But the number of complaints declined each month, and the biennial report contained no information about actual enforcement.

Another distressing trend is that the number of telemarketing companies that signed up and paid to receive the list (so as not to call numbers on the registry) dropped from 3,923 in fiscal year 2009 to 2,875 last year.

In short, callers and the called have concluded that there isn't much to be gained by contacting the Do Not Call registry.  Heck, even politicians and political groups send robocalls the week before each election.

Actually, in 2012, the Do Not Call agency sponsored a "Robocall Challenge" contest with a $50,000 prize to the person or group that devised a way to block those annoying calls from people wanting to reduce our credit card interest rates.  There were 798 proposals.  Three winners were announced last April, but nothing seems to have happened since then.  Maybe all the federal techies have been too busy setting up the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

If the government really wants to do something about robocalls, I don't see why it doesn't get in touch with the people who run shows like American Idol. They figured out years ago how to block programmed junk voting that clogged their phone lines as excited fans tried to tip the scales for their favorite candidates.