Sometime last Fall our Canadian Government finally got around to creating an official “Do Not Call” website where Canadian residents could go and add their home or even their cell phone numbers to a list that would supposedly be checked by telemarketers and keep you off their call lists.
Sounds great right? Finally a way to get those pesky telemarketers to stop calling our home at all ours of the day and evening.
Uh huh …
Guess what? Just about anyone can register as a “telemarketing firm” by paying a $50 fee. Once they’re registered they can access the list and copy it. That’s fine if it’s a legitimate telemarketing business in Canada who’s trying to abide by the Do not Call laws. However, since just about anyone can register as a telemarketer and it’s not checked an unscrupulous person could sign up, download the list and then sell it to marketers in other countries who don’t have to obey our Canadian telemarketing laws and regulations.
If you live in Canada you’ve probably seen new stories from January onward talking about how the Do Not Call list is being abused.
Chris and I added our number to the list in either late November or early December. By the end of January we started to get even more calls from telemarketers than we normally do! I’ve always been hesitant to pick up the phone when I don’t recognize the number, so what I’ve been doing is checking out all the 1-800 numbers that are calling on the internet.
Some of the calls we are getting are from companies that just call to see if anyone answers the phone and if someone does they know the number is live and they turn around and sell the phone number to other marketers! Other calls are from scam companies stating they can lower your credit card interest rates or provide an extended warranty for your car (even though they don’t even know if you have a car or if it’s a 25 year old clunker!), others are calls stating that “you’ve won a free trip” or membership cards to gyms or membership stores.
It’s a pain in the butt! I don’t sleep well at night so I sometimes sleep late into the morning. I can’t even do that anymore because the calls start as early at 8 am and go on until almost 10 pm! These days we try to remember to unplug the phone late at night before we go to bed and then I plug it back in once I’m up.
There’s a number on the Canadian Do Not Call list website that you can call and have your phone number removed. I already had our number removed about two weeks ago, but the calls are still coming. I shouldn’t have added our home phone number to the list in the first place … God only knows how many illegal telemarketing lists our number has been listed on in the three or so months that we were on the list.
If you’re in Canada were you silly enough to add your home number to the do not call list? And if you are elsewhere do you also have a do not call list that telemarketers in your Country are supposed to abide by?
Don’t you just hate telemarketing and survey calls?
I put my number on the U.S. “Do Not Call” list a few years ago, and never got another call. It’s great! Don’t know why the Canadian version wouldn’t be the same. Even better, when I went completely mobile and dumped my landline, even fewer people call me. I highly recommend it!