See telemarketers. See telemarketers get spanked!

[giza]

FIRST DNC ACTION SPARKED BY CALL TO FTC COMMISSIONER

NEW YORK -- The first national no-call action filed by the Federal Trade Commission resulted from an ill-advised telemarketing call to an FTC commissioner, an agency official said yesterday during a session at the DMD New York Conference & Exposition.

National Consumer Council purchased a subscription to the national no-call registry, but it failed to block a call to FTC commissioner Orson Swindle. The story was told by Thomas A. Cohn, FTC senior assistant regional director for the northeast region.

NCC became the subject of an undercover investigation by the FTC and received no advance notice that an inquiry was underway because of allegations of fraud as well as no-call violations, Cohn said. The FTC announced a civil suit against NCC on May 5.

http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=27964

Does anyone else find it amewsing that the Federal Trade Commission, the agency charged with cracking down on deceptive trade practices (among other things) has a commissioner with the last name of Swindle!

Comments

Poor luck on NCC's part, I'd say.

[feren.livejournal.com]

This story incidentally reminds me of something that happened to me back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I was running a BBS at the time and a ruggie I had recently booted off the board decided to use a wardialer program to run down a prefix block of pagers, sending my home phone number to approximately 430 people at 3:30 in the morning. One of those people happened to be a two-star general. Needless to say he was not amused and put a bit of effort into finding out who was using his pager as a toy. I don't know if the military ever succeeded in extracting the data from the pager company, but the ruggie got rather quite rather fast once he was involved and the excuse of "we can only block one number from our system at any given time" was quickly dropped by the paging service.