A Texas man who was receiving 10 to 24 spam calls and text messages a day tried to stop the madness by putting his number on the National Denial Call Registry. When that didn’t work, this man — financial accounting consultant Dan Graham — says he filed about two dozen complaints with the BBB, but that didn’t help either. Finally, he hit TV scammers where it hurt by filing about 50 small claims cases — and has so far earned $75,000 in settlements, according to MSN.
Now Graham hopes others can follow suit so that the scammers behind him don’t bring this kind of telemarketing harassment anymore.
“If people knew how to fight back and started doing it, we could make this kind of endless spam out of reach for the people who do it,” he said, according to MSN. “I hope there are enough of us who will stand up, start to resist, that it will become more expensive for companies to casually hire these telemarketers and engage in these telemarketing practices… it’s more expensive than the benefit they get from it.”
From MSN:
Last April, Graham filed his first lawsuit in Travis County against a company that violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
“In an effort to cope with the growing number of telephone marketing calls, Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in 1991,” according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
It restricts telemarketing calls and the use of automated or pre-recorded calls or text messages.
In 2012, the FCC said the agency revised the rules, requiring telemarketers to: “(1) obtain prior express written consent from consumers before calling them through bots, (2) no longer allow telemarketers to use ‘established business relationships’ to avoid consumer consent to their home phones, and (3) require telemarketers to provide an automated, interactive “opt-out” mechanism during each automated call so that consumers can immediately ask the telemarketer to stop calling.”
“They have gone from simple ‘Hey we want to sell you a car… we want to sell insurance’ calls to text messages which I would say are blatant scams. “You won an iPad” or you know, “You won an iPhone” or “Your phone is infected and you need to download this antivirus software” and the like,” he explained. …
Graham has received some relief from calls and messages since the lawsuits. …
Graham explained that anyone who receives these calls and texts should report it to the FTC and find out the company is behind it, and then write a review and post on social media about what happened.
He said Travis County has made the application process very consumer friendly and you can do a lot online.