France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week
apnews.com114 points by geox 17 hours ago
114 points by geox 17 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
If financial incentives align, we will be surprised how effective they would become.
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.
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.
"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:
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.