Just received a phone call , on the land line , from an organisation called " mycharitysurvey.com ". It was from a call centre and the person phoning was up front about who they were , I was checking for their website as I spoke to him …very impressive site . After that we got down to to " tin tacks "/
The difference was that this time they were going to survey me on my potential to donate to the charities they represent . I presume they were going to ask me questions regarding income etc .The caller had advised me in his opening spiel that the information I provided would be passed on to the charities they represented . He seemed to be over emphasising to me that this was just a survey . The caller new my address but not my suburb or post code . Naturally I did not give them that information . /
I told him I would not take his "potential " to donate survey . He politely thanked me for taking his call and then hung up . The incoming number was 0730734207 . The web site he said he represented indeed exists /
This seems to be a new ploy to circumnavigate the laws regarding marketing calls . Whereas before they just asked you if you had heard of the charities and a week or so later you were bombarded with calls saying you had " Shown interest in our charity " now they seem to be hiding behind a survey to ascertain what your financial position is and then to to decide what your capacity to donate would be. . No doubt the results would be the same , charities would start phoning you asking for donations .
I really think the existing laws should be looked at and strengthened . I know Choice are doing a piece regarding the above .
I donate to charities I choose and I find this sort of behaviour invasive and a put off. Any charity that uses this method is not much of a charity at all.
In America if you go on to the Do Not Call register NO COMMERCIAL GROUP can call you - not salesstaff, not charities, not religious organisations, not political organisations. Once again, we here in Australia take the second rate option. So now we get numerous (and I mean almost daily) calls from “Charitable” organisations that turn out to be big commercial companies that supposedly work for many charities and take a huge cut of the donation while leaving the charity a pittance.
Can someone wake the governments up so that when I say Do Not Call it actually means something.
And no I am not some curmudgeonly miser who hates giving to others, my wife and I in fact donate a lot of money to a number of charities.
The reason from my cynical perspective is that the Govt make it so hard for battlers to survive that if they stopped charities getting any money via cold calls the battlers might rise up and create mayhem in society. And if they stopped political calls we wouldn’t know who to vote for </end of cynical rant.
Just need to ask, have you (eg one of the ‘someones’) made your voice known to your MP, senators, and opposition parties?
Choice had a limited approach in a 2016 activity but limited to those callers ‘asking for money’. It has been shown the callers circumvent the supposed restrictions in all sorts of ways, and as @grahroll admonishes plus some, if we take it too far the charities might need to reinvent how they raise funds and operate without us getting calls from for-high-profit-business skimmers; researchers might need to do research using empirical sources rather than relying on anecdotal comments; and worse, we might not hear from our illustrious grubs about what a good job they do for us and could accidentally vote for the other mob thinking they did it! (my cynical rant will almost certainly continue)
No, TheBBG, I have not contacted any politician about this particular issue because I have been contacting them about many other, probably more important issues. I also firmly believe that our modern politicians are not responsive to real problems that effect ordinary people but are more concerned with staying in office long enough to collect a nice parliamentary pension.
Howver, this issue of phone abuse by salespeople and criminals has become such a major problem that I know a number of people who have dropped a hard line home phone because of “nuisance” calls. It is appalling to me that we can block unwanted calls easily on our mobile phones but the major phone companies do not make it easy for us to do that on our home phone. This is where I would like to see Government action. With modern technology it should be possible to trace the origin of the criminal spam calls from India and elsewhere, and with the asked for help of the Indian (and other) governments, catch and punish the criminals. My 91 year old father stopped answering his phone because these criminals kept phoning and I know many vulnerable people have lost money to them. I simply can’t believe that nothing can be done about it. I know this is going beyond the origonal topic of so called charity survey callers, but to me the whole issue of criminal and nuisance phone calls should be addressed.
They use similar tech to avoid the issue of being traced. They can also generate numbers to call from almost all day long.
If you trace them another suspect business will start up almost immediately if you can even manage to get something done about the first one. What they are doing is certainly against Australian Law but then you have to navigate the foreign law as well. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t do something, I just mean it is a huge issue to overcome when it may not be enforced as strictly overseas as it may be here.
Mobile phones are not immune to this problem and if they keep changing their calling number you can run out of room in your phone’s block list very fast. It depends on how persistent/annoying they want to be. It may be easier to create a Whitelist for your phone than have a block list on it. Of course this stops “Private Number” calls so may not be the answer depending on your particular needs. As we move to more VOIP services for our “fixed lines” with the NBN, whitelists may become more common as most VOIP services support whitelisting.
grahroll, You obviously know more about the technicalities of this problem than I do. I hate to think the scammers will continue to get away with their activities as I know many, especially elderly people, have had money stolen by these criminals. The problem with a white list solution is that it automatically makes it harder for any one whom you have not contacted before, and is therefore not on your white list, to contact you. What I would like is a system whereby if you receive a call on your land line from a number that is undesired, you simply press a “block” button on your phone and it is permanently blocked. Telstra has some sort of “Block” button but I think their system is rather involved. Optus can offer me nothing at all in the way of blocking undesired numbers. As I said, I can see this issue as being a further reason for people to stop having land lines and I would consider that to be a big mistake.
As @grahroll wrote, the caller ID numbers are easily faked as well as randomised. You could add numbers to a ‘block list’ forever and not get even the first real boiler room scammer as they use number after number after number.
Thus a ‘block this number button’ would be futile and could lead to more not less frustration when it did not have the anticipated outcome of actually blocking anyone let alone scammers.
Then there is the private number - no caller ID. Common for some businesses and government agencies. My partner and I both worked at government agencies where all outgoing calls were ‘private numbers’. How does one block or receive what could be a very important call or international scammers?
Again as @grahroll wrote mobiles are the same. In these times of VOIP ringing a mobile can be cheaper than ringing a landline. While many if not most mobiles have some facility to block calls it is still a never ending list with similar dramas to the land-line problem.
An analogy of how addressing the bad guys often traps the innocent bystanders are the ramifications of FATCA for US citizens. Details would be off topic but ‘regular’ US expat citizens have quite a burden because the US grabbed for taxes from fleeing non-combatants during the American civil war, and more recently legislated to address international money laundering by criminals and the wealthy hiding money.
Depending on the jurisdiction some countries do not allow fake caller-IDs but that is a hackable feature; and some only allow sales of phone numbers for the country of the card billing address. Global nomads often have good reasons for wanting globalised ‘local’ numbers in different countries, but they are already caught up in places. It will only get tighter…
Criminals are mostly ingenious or stupid; the former are the problems. They have already had a significant impact and will continue to do so because criminal law is by its nature reactive.
There are steps a user can take to lessen the impact, however it is not a cure all. It is some steps of what you can do to reduce calls from businesses you provide details to for surveys and such but it also works for the cold callers.
Obtain a silent number or have your current number made a “silent” one.
Next step is register your number with the DNCR (this will not stop all calls but it is a necessary step)
Then once registered do not provide this number to any business other than necessary ones eg Power Company, Govt Departments such as Centrelink, your Doctor. Be harsh with your judgement of who to trust with your number, and if you use the techniques outlined just below here you may judge some of the contacts are to get the “throw away number” instead.
Read the following previous post of mine (it references competitions but the techniques also work for cold callers):
The silent number will take some time to show results (usually between 12 to 24 months) and it will not completely eradicate cold calls but it will help reduce them significantly.
Over the past few days I have realised that many company webforms, including charities, will not accept inquiries or donations by card unless a phone number is entered. It apparently does not matter what phone number is entered so the number for the Honourable Minister for Communications might be appropriate.
This doesn’t affect me anymore, but I would fully support a do-not-call approach that was all inclusive - you either opt in for any unsolicited call, or opt-out for all of them. I have little enough time to talk to people I actually know
And so it continues . Over the last 4-5 days the land line would ring , I would answer , nobody there .The incoming numbers were these 061730734207 and 061730734209 . Today being the 28-04-2018 the phone rung twice in the morning . Both dead calls but those numbers . The third time it rung it was a person from my Charity Survey .com again . /
For the sake of this post I let them talk longer this time . They told me I could opt out by visiting their web site . Only problem is you have to virtually tell them your life story to opt out ??? The phone person already had my address which I’m not happy about . He thought he was talking to my brother . I’ve since checked his computer and deactivated Chrome auto fill etc /
The first question was my age bracket . I hung up knowing what would come next . " What is the average annual income of the household etc etc ." Be careful I think that in opting out , he was most emphatic and repetitive on this point , you would be opting " in " for a barrage of unwanted calls from other call centres .
I donate to a lot of charities but if I get calls from a charity ( or similar) I tell them I never donate to anyone asking for money by phone and let them know that I will now take that charity off of my donation list because they called me. that seems to stop them doing it
