The Do Not Call List: Why It’s Useless to Register in 2017

If you are receiving a lot of unwanted spam calls, you may be considering (or have already registered) your number on the National Do Not Call Registry. While the Do Not Call List can stop some unwanted telephone solicitations, it’s not the complete solution to stop your spam call problem. Here’s why.

The National Do Not Call Registry is a do not call list that legitimate companies are required to honor. The common misconception of the Do Not Call List is that it will stop illegal spam, robocallers, and phone fraud, when in reality that is not what it was designed to do. Why not? Because scammers do not care.

The people behind these illegal spam calls and illegal robocalls know that what they are doing is illegal, but they take the risk anyways. All they care about is trying to scam you, so why would the Do Not Call Registry matter to them? These people are not going to abide by the law and buy into honoring this list of numbers. Because if you’re a crook, wouldn’t you be even more attracted to numbers on this Do Not Call List knowing there are real people behind them?

It’s not to say that registering for the Do Not Call List won’t do anything for you. Adding your phone numbers to the list you will stop legitimate telemarketers (who do not wish to break the law) from calling your submitted numbers. Legal businesses have to purchase access to this list if they want to sell their services by telephone. And to be fair, most do! But the unfortunate reality is that most of the spam calls you receive are not from these legal businesses, they’re from people who don’t care about you or the law.

VoIP Changed Robocalls Forever

Over the last five years,  the internet made placing international calls a lot easier and less expensive. While this allowed us to connect with friends and family all over the world, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology made it easy to spam calls from spoofed numbers in high volumes anywhere in the world. Illegal scammers are now able to contact us through spoofed numbers, most of which can be made to look as though their call is coming from your area code.

This trick alone has increased the amount of callers answering illegal spam calls by nearly 30%.

Why? Because you trust a number calling from a familiar area code much more than an unfamiliar number from Texas, right? Exactly. Spammers will take any opportunity to invade your privacy if it means they can steal money and time from you.

Increased international access to VoIP services and phone spoofing has made it increasingly difficult for the Do Not Call List or any other similar solution to actually be effective. Open source telephony software is readily available all over the world, and makes it cheap and easy to open a call center with hundreds of agents nearly anywhere in the world. Because of this, many of these spam calls are now made all over the world from places such as India, Jamaica, Pakistan and Turkey.

These companies, due to their location, are not technically held to the FCC rules and regulations. This means that for all of the millions of spoofed calls they place each day, they are not formally liable for any fines delivered from the FCC, nor do they care about abiding by these laws. So that robocall from the IRS that interrupted dinner last night after you registered your number on the Do Not Call List is going to keep calling, (especially because you keep answering) unless you take matters into your own hands.

It’s Not Just the Do Not Call List, You’re Making It Worse Too

Telemarketers and spammers are up against great odds to successfully get what they need from you. Nearly 96% of the time the item they are soliciting from their unwanted calls are turned down. So by nature – they need to place an astronomical volume of calls in order to be successful just 4% of the time. You may be thinking, why even bother?

While it certainly depends on what the caller is soliciting from you – whether it be legal business or telemarketing inquiries or illegal gathering of information such as credit card information, unwanted callers make money by placing calls to you and doing whatever they can to con you before you hang up. What does this mean for you? A caller is going to keep trying you until they think your number is disconnected or no longer in service. Here’s what you’re doing to make your problem worse:

• Answering the Phone – By picking up the call, you confirm to the caller that there is a real person at the end of the phone line. Even if you hang up immediately after answering, you will be flagged as a lead and tried again later.
• Opting out of Calls – When you express you do not consent to the call and wish not to be contacted again, legal businesses must uphold to that. But since the majority of these callers are calling internationally, illegally, or both – they don’t care if you opt out, nor are they lawfully required to honor your request.
• Using the default call blocking options offered on iPhone and Android – As mentioned above, spam callers don’t care if you used the call blocking option built into your iPhone or Android phone to block the number they just called you from – as soon as they know there’s another person on the other end of the line, they’re going to call you again from a different caller ID.

Is There One Solution That Will Actually Stop the Problem?

Yes, the solution is to ensure these spam callers never reach your phone – even if they get their hands on your phone number. The only way to truly accomplish this is to download a third party spam call blocking app to ensure callers can’t reach you when they try to call. The FTC and FCC even suggest this solution to spam call victims, especially to reduce the volume of international illegal calls the Do Not Call List does not protect against.

TrapCall, the #1 rated spam call blocking and call unmasking app, provides spam call protection against unwanted callers and real-time caller identification. TrapCall maintains an up to date list of the most offensive spam callers, unmasks & notifies you of offensive callers before you even pick up the phone, and records calls to provide proof of harassment.

Get started protecting phone privacy today!