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Australia banned telemarketing a while ago, it worked pretty well. The only spam phone calls left are 100% illegal scammers.

https://www.acma.gov.au/telemarketing-and-e-marketing they give out million+ dollar fines which sort things out. Just being a customer doesn't allow them to send marketing, you have to opt in.

It's the year 2026, I refuse to believe that phone companies cannot figure out who is a scammer and who is not.
I get if it's hard to figure out who's a scammer, but can't they at least figure out who is calling? And if the other end can't prove that it owns that number, they don't get to call me.

Also, getting SMS from email addresses. Nobody asked for that feature, please nuke it.

Many scammers use internet telephony to call someone and some even spoof the caller id. In India, the mobile companies request subscribers to report any international call which shows local spoofed caller ids to them, so they can investigate it. So I am guessing it is trickier than we believe to track them ...
Can they at least flag calls as being from voip?
If it is local, they probably can. But VoIP being international is the problem. See Why in the year of our lord 2022 am I still getting robocalls??? - https://www.vox.com/recode/22882647/robocalls-robotexts-scam... ...
If financial incentives align, we will be surprised how effective they would become.
You can ban these practices as much as you want, but what we really need is ENFORCING. I have to be able to report a phone number that called me, and have them either fined or blocked at the national level for spam.
We have that in France already it is called bloctel
Bloctel is becoming obsolete due to this change.
What's the status of discounts granted in exchange for marketing consent? Because that's how they bait many older consumers into receiving these calls.
Marketing consent is granted via sweepstakes.
It happened in Spain months ago. Then the "marketers" start calling from international phone numbers.
AHH is that why I get so many international calls?

Also the energy company scammers in Spain are still going strong. Even on local numbers.

Let them pay international rates. One dollar a minute, eh?

If they're calling from within the EU then a cross-country judgement is still enforceable, so I assume they aren't doing that.

"International rates" aren't a thing anymore since the advent of VOIP. It doesn't matter whether you're connecting from France or Fiji, with VOIP you pay the same rate.
International rates are just a consumer thing.
Is it though in practice?
Then most people can just block all international numbers. Hope to see phone number whitelisting soon.
what does HN think are the better alternatives to cold contact?

businesses obviously keep doing unsolicited telemarketing calls because it works to some extent

Build a product worth purchasing.
Most unsolicited telemarketing is inefficient--and that means a high cost of making the sale, which means whatever they are offering is either too expensive, too low quality, or an outright scam.
Does there have to be a alternative? Companies preying on the elderly and uninformed is not something we necessarily need as a society. (99% of my telemarketing calls are scams where they pretend to represent my current power company to get me to sign a contract with a different company).
There does not need to be an alternative. It just needs to stop.
Wasting the telemarketers' time
Annoying tons of people so some small percent buys your stuff is a shitty thing to do. Their winning more than they lose from being shitty isn't something we have to offer an alternative to.
selling fentanyl works pretty well too from a business perspective
There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to, or has had previous dealings with. Many will be unsolicited but not all will be.

Many of these calls are coming out of the Third World countries which are barely regulated in this regard, so good luck with enforcing it.

> There is a grey area here of calls from businesses which the customer is signed up to

Pretty much exactly how it is in Switzerland. I once had a rather unpleasant experience with my old internet provider (Sunrise) where I asked the telemarketer who called me not to do so again, and was told they "had a right to do so, because I was a customer". I immediately cancelled, quoting this as the reason why (Sunrise would later try to tell me this never happened, but that's another story).

With that said, I think it does make a difference: if some random company calls, they can't lose my business because they don't have it; if a company I am a customer with calls and refuses to stop when I ask them to, they risk losing my business. I don't know if this is the reason why, but I barely get any telemarketing calls (never heard of anyone else here who has either).

Another moment of potential irritation: companies being bought out or losing their network supplier giving that third company a business relationship with you.
Which is why nowadays I never take calls if the prefix is from a country I don't have connections with, it is private, or doesn't map to any of my contacts.

If it is someone that I actually know, they will be aware how to actually reach me.

If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)
I paid for a spam call blocking service about twenty years ago. The annoying thing is not only did it fail to prevent the spam calls from abroad, when someone was trying to call me from Germany it wouldn't let the call through.
There was a time I had a scheduled job interview and got two spam calls from the same area code as the interviewer 2 minutes before. The third time, I hung up on the actual interviewer.
Companies aren't allowed to do cold calling in my country. Wiped out an entire industry and nobody wept.

Scams are not what I would define as "telemarketing" though.

It would be helpful to know your country in this thread.
In my experience most of these came from France itself or from Italy. Not exactly third world, eh?
Other person should've specified, the person calling is in a third-world country but they're dialing from inside via some voip service. So then what I don't get is, can't they go after the voip services?
A lot of the ones here appear to have originated in India, which had a major regulation problem for a while (although I think the Indian government has begun to deal with it.) A lesser proportion were from countries in Africa.
I'd like to see forced legislation requiring marketers to disclose the exact source and campaign they acquired your data in.

I've been getting a barage of non-stop harassment via unwanted magazine subscriptions. People Inc claims some company called "Subco" signed me up and won't allow me to cancel, only "Subco" can do that. "Subco" then claims they got my information from someone else down the line. They then blame someone else, someone else...

... and I still have no clue who the hell decided to sign me up for 20 magazines in the mail.

Yup. Someone clearly scraped my LinkedIn and sold the info as a bogus lead, I've been getting several texts/day about business financing, and the occasional call. Ironically, the calls were better--every caller understood they had bad data and never tried again.
This could be dealt with in the U.S. with simple enforcement, but would also limit political parties soliciting by phone and that is my conspiracy theory for why it isn't enforced. It is trivial to find the VoIP providers that are providing the numbers to these telemarketing companies. NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administrator) has a tool for finding them. https://nanpa.com/sites/default/files/2025-03/InstructionsFo...
Make c5 great again <3
They should do the same here in Spain and not just for consumers but B2B as well.

I get several sales people bugging me on email and LinkedIn per day. Of course I block them all but it just sickens me.

Good!