FTC Vows Not To Purge Numbers From Do Not Call List

Agency backtracks, says consumers won't need to reregister

October 23, 2007

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Backtracking from earlier statements, the Federal Trade Commission now says it will not purge consumers’ telephone numbers from the national Do Not Call list – numbers that most telemarketers are not permitted to call.

The first numbers were scheduled to be purged from the list in 2008.

Testifying before a House subcommittee, Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Lydia Parnes said that after "carefully considering" changes that have taken place since the registry was implemented in June 2003, “the Commission now commits that it will not drop any telephone numbers from the registry based on the five-year expiration period pending final Congressional or agency action on whether to make registration permanent.”

When the registry was developed, the FTC adopted a five-year reregistration mechanism and said that the list – which now contains more than 145 million phone numbers – would be periodically purged of disconnected or reassigned numbers.

The idea was to ensure accuracy, she said.

But since the registry has been in place, Parnes says several changes have occurred, including the increased use of cell phones and the popularity of telephone number portability.

Parnes also said the registry has been implemented successfully for five years and has included a scrubbing program that has removed disconnected and reassigned numbers each month. But perhaps the real reason for the change in policy is the agency’s desire to avoid messing up a good thing.

“The registry has enjoyed unprecedented popularity and helped enhance the privacy of the American public in a tangible way,” Parnes said.

Enforcement

Citing a Harris Interactive survey released in January 2006 showing that 94 percent of American adults have heard of the registry and 76 percent have placed their phone numbers on it, Parnes also described how the FTC operates the Registry, its fee structure, and the agency’s enforcement actions against companies and individuals who have not complied with its requirements.

Since the registry has been in place, the commission has initiated 27 cases alleging DNC violations, resulting in a total of $8.8 million in civil penalties and $8.6 million in consumer redress or disgorgement of ill-gotten gains.

In one recent case highlighted in the testimony, the commission targeted The Broadcast Team, a telemarketer that allegedly used “voice broadcasting” to make tens of millions of illegal automated telemarketing calls, often to numbers on the Registry.

According to the FTC’s complaint, The Broadcast Team violated the “abandoned calls” provision of the DNC component of the Telemarketing Sales Rule, either by immediately hanging up on a consumer, or in some instances playing a recording instead of connecting a consumer to a live sales representative within two seconds after the consumer answered the phone.

In settling the commission’s charges, The Broadcast Team agreed to pay a $1 million civil penalty, the second-largest penalty obtained in a Do Not Call case. Satellite television subscription seller DirecTV paid a $5.3 million penalty in 2005 for allegedly violating the Do Not Call provisions of the Telemarketing Sales Rule.

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