More than a year after the last update of the General Telecommunications Law that should put an end to spam calls, these continue to be produced. Good for the exceptions that the regulations establish, ‘that there is prior consent to receive this type of commercial communications’ – which is achieved inadvertently by the user through the terms of service of an app or service—, or by bad business practices such as not respecting the inclusion of users in the Robinson Listone of the most used options to try to avoid this type of unwanted calls.
In any case, spam is still a problem for many users. According to the Global Call Threat Report conducted by Hiya, an American company that provides spam and toll fraud protection services, during the third quarter of this year Spain and France have been the European countries with the highest rates of spamas has happened throughout the previous year. In Spain, banking scams abound after this type of spam calls, which citizens receive, on average, 10 times a month.
Now, the person who receives this type of calls has options to avoid them, which is what the former teleoperator remembers. Eleonore Bounhiol in the French magazine Maison & Travaux. A decade ago, Bounhiol worked as a teleoperator conducting telephone surveys for a large French bank. She was not hired directly by the entity, but by an advertising agency that had a subcontractor with the bank.
The former teleoperator explains that this type of companies employ automated systems for making calls. ‘As long as a person did not answer, their number remained on our automatic callback list. This meant that You could call the same number several times a day for days and days in a row‘, says Bounhiol. For this reason, Ignoring the call and not answering it is not enough to stop receiving themsince the system will continue repeating it periodically until the receiver goes off-hook.
Bounhiol recommends answer the calleven if there is no intention to talk. And then ‘explicitly request to be removed from the calling list’given that ‘the company has the legal obligation to enforce its request’, something that happens in both France and Spain.
Another striking aspect that Bounhiol reveals about the operation of unwanted calls is that, as a teleoperator, He could never end a conversation and that it should always be the receiver who did it.even in cases where they responded with insults. To get around the rejection at the beginning of the call, you also had to claiming it would only take ‘a few seconds’, when in reality it was going to be more than 10 minutes.