A feeling of betrayal by 'Do Not Call' list

People who put their phone numbers on the Do Not Call list reported a staggering 3.7 million violations last year. That doesn't include the zillions who never file complaints about the nightly interruptions by Rachel from Cardholder Services and her prerecorded cronies.

Yet the man at the helm of the Do Not Call registry says that's not a sign that the decade-old list is failing. When was the last time you got a telemarketing call from an actual human, asks Mitch Katz, spokesman for the Federal Trade Commission.

True, the Do Not Call list has mostly put an end to telemarketing calls from people you can personally scream at. But they have been replaced by robocalls, dialed by the billions from unscrupulous companies in distant "boiler rooms," their originating numbers easily masked with spoofing software.

Most folks in the world would gladly trade malaria, hyperinflation and death squads for unwanted telephone calls. Yet those calls evoke a peculiar rage among Americans, because it's a problem that should be so easy to solve.

The Do Not Call list is a victim of its own deceptive simplicity. Go to donotcall.gov, type in your phone number and blissful tranquillity will be yours. The registry now includes more than 223 million numbers, 4.2 million of them in Minnesota alone.

It doesn't cost taxpayers any money because it's funded by the fees law-abiding companies pay to download the registry, Katz said. For a time, after it debuted in 2003, everybody could tell that Do Not Call made a difference.

But in 2012, the number of complaints of violation hit a record 3.8 million, more than double what it was in 2010. These days, plenty of folks feel betrayed. One of them is Frank Adler. He's a Macalester College professor whose land line in St. Paul is besieged every night with offers of medical alert systems and credit card rate reductions, despite its Do Not Call registration. "From a public policy perspective, I wonder why they continue to exist," Adler said.

A rule adopted in 2009 makes most robocalls illegal on every line. In its war against Rachel from Cardholder Services, that elusive pitchwoman for dubious debt relief, the FTC has shut down companies responsible for 2.5 billion robocalls. Last year, the FTC slapped its largest Do Not Call fine ever, $7.5 million, on a mortgage company accused of calling 5.4 million prohibited numbers and making deceptive pitches, to boot.

As soon as one Rachel company is shut down, another pops up, hydralike. So the FTC also is putting its effort into finding a technical solution by sponsoring "Robocall summits" and encouraging the spread of call-filtering and spoof-killing technology.

"We feel that call-blocking solutions that get embraced and rolled out to more and more Americans, plus the ability to end spoofing — those two technological innovations will be game changers," Bandy said.

Bandy said that people have slain this kind of beast before. Not along ago, inboxes got so much spam about organ enlargement, prescription painkillers and get-rich pitches from the widow of Mobutu Sese Seko that some thought e-mail would collapse. Spam filters came to the rescue, at least enough that e-mail became safe for work again.

The FTC says it's working with phone companies to make the technical changes happen. But telephone companies say Federal Communications Commission rules may make it illegal for them to use call-blocking software.

When that happens, please don't call to let us know.