Congratulations, telemarketers. You just got exactly what you asked for.
You have abused consumers for years, and now it’s time to pay.
Thanks to the FTC’s amended Telephone Sales Rule, you will no longer be able to deluge home phones with abandoned calls, debit credit cards without permission and simply ignore do-not-call requests. The TSR puts the consumer into the driver’s seat for the first time in the miserable history of outbound calling.
And stop whining about how this will hurt legitimate companies.
To reach the 1% who will respond to an offer, even the best firms think nothing of alienating the remaining 99% who receive the call.
Anyway, what’s legitimate about Triad Marketing and other exponents of advance consent marketing? To defend them is to defend the indefensible.
Maybe we would be less gleeful if the industry had stood up and taken on Triad and the other rip-off artists three years ago. But it ignored the issue, just as it ignored the escalating problem of hang-up calls.
But maybe we ought to slow down here and stop laying on the schadenfreude. We admit that the TSR is an imperfect document in many ways.
Take the provisions on advance consent marketing. Nobody can deny that this area is a cesspool in bad need of cleaning out. But the FTC should have stopped with the prohibition on billing a credit card without consent.
It’s overkill to force marketers to extract the last four digits of a credit card number from a consumer
