I’m on the federal do not call list, and I just got a telemarketing call from Dish Network. The conversation went something like:
Me: Hello
Dish: Hello may I speak with Mr. Derick?
Me: Who?
Dish: I need to speak with the head of the household or whoever owns this home.
Me: OK you’re speaking to him
Dish: Hi my name is xkjhdf and I’m calling on behalf of Dish Network and I’d like to offer you…
Me: Excuse me, but I’m on the federal do not call list.
Dish: Oh I’m sorry, I do not have that information. *click*
No good bye, no “have a nice day”… but I guess it’s a good thing that he ran away when I mentioned the do not call list.
I did a search on google for dish network do not call list and.. holy cow.. they were warned a lot in 2005 for violating the do not call rules. And here we are again in 2006 and they’re still at it. Maybe they consider the cost/risk of being fined less than the money they’ll make off of customers that don’t report them.
If you get telemarketed too and you’re in the do not call registery, please.. file a complaint with the FTC regarding a do not call violation.
I would also contact the Members of Congress who receive political contributions from Echostar executives. For example – Charles W. Ergen contributes quite a bit to both the Republicans and Democrats. I http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations/Charles_Ergen.phpI would cross reference that list with anyone who has voted for any “Do Not Call Registry.” Maybe our elected members of Congress can do something.
Over the past year and half we have received almost daily sales calls from the Dish Network (Echostar Communications Co) even though our home phone number has been listed on the National Do Not Call Registry and the Texas DO Not Call Registry for the past three years. We have told the Dish Network caller repeatedly that they have violated the do not call law. They seemed not to care at all. In fact they seemed to be foreign based (in China) and didn’t even know such a thing as a do not call list. For the first year, we reported each incident to the National Do Not Call Registry website. Nothing happened. We received no feedback or inquiry from the National Do Not Call Registry. The calls from the Dish Network kept on coming. In December of 2006, we filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau of Denver (BBB). Dish Network responded to this complaint. A woman from the TCPA department of the Echostar LLC called me and requested me to set up a sting operation to catch the caller. I agreed. The woman gave me a fake SS# and a Visa card#. I did the sting operation the next day on the new Dish Network caller. The Dish Network person sent a letter to me and BBB informing us that they did an investigation based upon the sting operation and was able to identify the caller as someone from a company based in Maryland called Total Marketing Solutions. In the letter Dish Network promised that no more calls starting February, 2007. Yet, right after this letter, the call kept on coming until today. I called the woman in the Dish Network headquarters and told her that there were new calls and I did additional sting operations on the new callers. I asked her to investigate. She never did. Apparently they did the investigation after the first sting operation just to be able to send that letter to BBB to close the case. Once the case was closed, they would do nothing to investigate the new calls even though they promised in writing of no new calls. After two months I couldn’t get any response from the woman in the Dish Network who set up the sting operation. I called another person in Dish Network whose name appeared in the letter to me and BBB. I was told that the woman I worked with had quit. I filed complaint with the Texas Department of Consumer Protection, the Colorado Department of Consumer Protection, the FTC, and the FCC. None of they seemed to be able to do or did anything to stop the Dish Network from violating the do not call list. In the middle of 2007, I had enough and filed a second BBB complaint. Again, Dish Network responded to the complaint by doing another trace on one of a dozen or more of the sting operations I did. They reported the caller as one company based in California in another letter to BBB and me. Again Dish Network promised to stop the calls after July of 2007. Yet the calls kept on coming. I refused to close the second BBB complaint and insisted that Dish Network explain what they had done and would do to these law breakers and what measures they would take to make sure the calls would stop. Dish Network ignored my requests. After a while BBB closed the case and informed me that there was nothing more they could do since BBB had no enforcement authority. It seems to me that the Do Not Call list has no teeth at all. A company like Dish Network can simply ignore it and get away with it with abandon. Recently, we are getting calls every evening from Dish Network at 7:10 PM CST like clockwork. I am pretty sure it is an automated calling setup that just cycling through a phone list. I don’t know what I can do to stop them.