FTC Annual Do-Not-Call Report: 132 million Phone Numbers Now on List

Over the past five or so years, dinner time has been a little quieter in America for something like 132 million people.  They’re members of the Do Not Call registry; and their numbers are growing.

In fact, an additional 25 million phone numbers were added to the federal government’s list in fiscal 2006.

The list has little impact on the debt collection industry.  The Do Not Call registry does not protect consumers from debt collection calls.  Receiving the brunt of the program’s impact is the telemarketing industry.  However, the FTC has said that the program’s primary goal of reducing unwanted telemarketing calls is succeeding, primarily because a of compliance from telemarketers. The report notes that, while roughly 1.15 million complaints were received in fiscal 2006 from 374,937 registered phone numbers, that was the equivalent of only about one-quarter of 1 percent of the numbers in the database.

The Do Not Call program has an innovative way of paying for itself.  While it costs nothing for consumers to add their numbers to the list, telemarketers are required to pay an annual subscription fee to access the FTC list so those numbers can be blocked from their dial-out programs. The companies also must update their own calling lists every 31 days to ensure there are no numbers from the registry on it.