Telemarketing is a criminal enterprise supported by government because it is lucrative enough for the sociopaths perpetrating it to purchase politicians. I was part of the anti-spam activism movement in the very beginning, back in the late 80s and early 90s when Internet spamming first started and could have been nipped in the bud. What I witnessed was highly illuminative on why our society looks the way it does.
Originally, 99%+ of all Internet spam originated in the US, and some 70% was the result of just three people. The Internet had been built on an academic model of openness, and spammers took advantage of this to hijack wingates and mail servers to distribute their spam through throwaway accounts made with stolen credit card numbers or on AOL with their trial discs. It took years to get people to close these, and eventually only the creation of global blacklist maintainers forced ISPs to take action. By that time, certain ISPs and even backbones like UUnet had discovered they could turn a profit by signing secret contracts guaranteeing spammers protection, all the while claiming they were going after and shutting down spammers.
As all of this was happening, the US government struck a Senate subcommittee to craft regulations around spamming. The people on this committee were all ancient, rich, white, conservative men who had no idea what the Internet was, much less the technical issues around spamming. The Direct Marketing Association, to whom the spammers belonged, and which supported spamming, openly bribed the members of the subcommittee. You can look up the contributions, all legal and duly reported. Spamming costs the world hundreds of billions of dollars a year; the DMA purchased these politicians for about $10,000 apiece.
I remember reading an account of the hearings by a reporter who attended them. The DMA pro-spam lawyers arrived wearing $5000 suits. The anti-spam activists arrived in grubby jeans and t-shirts with memes on them… and smelled bad.
The results of those hearings legitimized email and Usenet spam and allowed for the creation of an entire industry based on the theft of other people’s resources. If you want more details about all of this, I recommend the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams. (I’m mentioned in the book, incidentally.)
Eventually, of course, spam became so prolific that even the government and the military began to feel the effects. When politicians and billionaires were no longer able to find their email in the sea of bestiality porn and penis extension spam, they finally started to introduce controls on spam. But by this time the industry had become so large and so lucrative that organized crime was involved, and the spammers simply moved their industry to places like Russia, China, and India where near-universal corruption meant as long as they greased the right palms they could operate with impunity.
The telemarketing industry used what happened around spamming as a template for their own survival. With the arrival of cellphones and hefty costs for usage, people began complaining about unwanted telemarking calls. When governments moved to “regulate” the industry rather than shutting it down entirely – again, thanks to bribes from lobbies like the DMA – it just encouraged the telemarketers to move their operations to places like India which already had operating call centres. Since they were already breaking the law, the telemarketers decided there was no point in trying to sell actual services any more. Now they engage in outright fraud and theft with impunity. People who the technical skills to track these scam artists down to call centres in places like Karachi have tried filing formal complaints with the police there, and absolutely nothing happens. They don’t even open investigations. Personally, I think these call centres should be targeted with drone strikes.
Anyway, this is why you’re getting calls, and where the calls are coming from, and why no one can do anything about it. Well, not entirely true; the telecoms could shut it down overnight, but why would they? They profit handsomely from all of this. My own telecom, Bell Canada, even does what they can to obstruct people’s ability to block the calls. For example, they won’t allow call-blocking on long-distance numbers.
The good news is there are ways to stop the calls if you’re creative. For example, I’m a union organizer with the IWW, and I was getting hammered with as many as a half-dozen calls a day from telemarketers to the point where I had to turn off my phone and could no longer be contacted by anyone. And I still had to wade through robocalls left on my voice mail. I started discussing answering calls again and talked to the people in the call centres about unionizing. I told them they knew their bosses were criminals and scam artists so they wouldn’t hesitate to screw their workers out of wages. I also explained that by unionizing they could squeeze their shitbag bosses for a lot more money than they were making. A few times I was able to give the workers contact information for the IWW, but mostly I’d get cut off in the middle of the call, probably by supervisors listening in at random. Very soon after that I stopped getting any calls from telemarketers. Like, at all. Zero. I think I’ve been put on some kind of blacklist. So if you’re willing to get creative, you can stop the calls.
edit: There is also some evidence that “do not call” lists are actually used by telemarketers as sources of phone numbers. The lists are freely available to any telemarketer who wants them, and since most of them are criminals anyway, it provides a handy list of phone numbers guaranteed to be active.
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