Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
I wonder how much we even need international calls from unknown numbers.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
In the EU its not uncommon to receive phone calls from other countries. Just the other day I received a large package and the driver called with an international number to make sure I would be home to receive it.
I dont think unknown numbers should be allowed at all, esp for business. I think its a reasonable requirement that if a business wants to call someone they are willing to identify them self.
When I was getting a D&B number I missed their call I wasn't expecting because I wont answer unknowns and my phone blocks half the calls they think are spam anyway, then had to spend the better half of a week answering spam calls before finally getting what I needed.
There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
>The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
> I assume ownership of the caller's number can be logged/checked.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
Not in the domain at all but wasn't this the purpose of STIR/SHAKEN but the biggest blocker was that large telcos hadn't deployed it? I think Android and iOS dialer app show you whether there was Caller ID Verification done or not so you may be able to drop anything unverified.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
Most EU countries implemented registration of every mobile number with personal details and national id number. Yet in the same countries there exist entire office buildings with tens of people receiving salaries for spam/scam/cold calling, and they are fully anonymous?!
The whitelist managed by the government is not a bad idea.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
Have you tried call screening? I know for sure apple phones can do this but I believe some android phones can too?
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling”
The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
At least a strategy to ignore unknown international numbers has much less collateral damage if any.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
Just easy ability to report would be enough. Then the govt can get to the phone number owner and make any middle men also responsible (in "tell us who was your client or pay the fine" way)
Marketing ruins everything it touches, from the public square to the internet and from the phone network to radio. I don’t know what the alternative is, but I don’t need one to see this is shit.
At the other side of the spectrum (they are mostly annoying, I agree) how do you keep promoting or selling your product if yiu cannot find your customers?
As a consumer, I don’t want you to find me. I’ll find you when I need you.
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
Advertising is such a zero sum game as well. The only reason companies have to cold call market is because their competitors are cold calling. So you have to participate to keep up. If no one can do it, no one is getting a leg up over the rest.
You’re making a lot of assumptions. What is the cost benefit for cold calling? You could conceivably be better off letting the competition bleed. But I suspect a legit cost benefit analysis is hard to come by, mostly because marketing sells itself to management first.
In my personal experience basically all spam calls in France come from a fixed set of number prefixes. [0]
So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.
Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.
My pet peeve is that a full class A attestation is still not a requirement in 2026. The US FCC won't do it. I have no hope from the current administration. However, perhaps France is in a unique position to implement this. The idea is that all calls that have a domestic caller ID will be required to have full class A attestation and all carriers will be required by law to block any calls that do not have such full attestation. Any carrier that attests phone numbers that it is not supposed to should get huge fines and criminal charges. This is my dream for what all Telecoms in the world should do, hopefully beginning with France. This requires broad support within the country and a firm deadline so companies don't shrug it off until the last moment and then demand an extension.
It's not about scams, it's about commercial telemarketing calls.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
> the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The problem with spoofing is that there are legitimate uses of it. It's probably solvable by only allowing spoofing of numbers you actually own (so if a hospital has 20 phone lines, they can spoof their publicly posted phone number, but random spammers can't spoof your neighbour's phone number).
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public
international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
Exactly, I think all these regulations in the Europe fail to understand the enforceability of these, any legitimate business won't be making unsolicited calls already. For instance, I weekly get unsolicited calls from a legit recruitment agency in the UK, never ever shared my data with them, they don't even email but directly call in absurd times. I requested removal of my data after months of ignored calls but they kept calling still, reported to ICO but no luck either.
I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.
This law is especially targeted at legit businesses... It's already illegal for scammers to call.
And I don't think something being hard to enforce is reason enough to not do anything about it. If we truly care about something, we can always find a way.
Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.
This seems so much of a no-brainer to me due to scammy calls to elderly and pure time loss responding to calls it is interesting not much has been done about it in other countries. I guess the telemarketers have a good lobby.
In the last 2-3 years, my impression is that most french numbers receive daily unsolicited phone calls. In 2026 they even started sending scammy “missing delivery” text message with your real name printed on an attached MMS picture (on a parcel to deliver), making it even more real.
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yup, having a French number is unbearable without automatic blacklist apps. I definitely notice it when it breaks after an iOS update, is start getting multiple calls a day. For any french here with an iPhone: Begone works great and has community lists for spam numbers.
The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.
> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.
And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.
That's great. Netherland banned them a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I still receive them. Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week from a major TV/internet provider (Ziggo-Vodafone; total crooks). I told them not to call me again, I complained to the regulator, but as far as I can tell, nothing was ever done about it.
So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.
From the same company? That's crazy. You'd think they'd get the message, but they're really stubborn. Most Dutch companies seem to obey the rules, but this one (and it's a big one) clearly does not. I still don't understand why they weren't fined into oblivion.
"God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales".
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.
> It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'.
Assuming you can get access to their phone, only allowing calls from saved numbers would probably be the best solution, assuming she doesn't get random calls from hospitals and the like. If she's still using a landline though, that's a tough one to solve.
It's funny and sad to see polite people run into scammers. I witnessed to a young man being almost unable to keep saying "no" for the 20th time to an insistent seller on a beach.
When it happens to me, they're met with silence or "GTFO" after the 3rd question. I am impolite.
To me it's just sad. Scammers and pushy sellers aren't acting in good faith, but polite people seem to be unable to recognise this, or unwilling to change their modus operandi in spite of it. Like, if you know the person in front of you is a knobhead who wants nothing more than for you to part with your money in exchange for nothing, why are you even entertaining the idea of treating them with even a sliver of respect?
Add in the fact that the person on the other end isn't even a human (it's not a human spam calling you; at best it's an automated call which get dumped on a human when it connects), and the whole thing gets even more absurd.
At least most of the Spanish one can be banned by blocklisting a whole company. which is what I did following a guide I found, and have reduced my Spam calls from 2 per day, to 3 per year.
However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.
some of the third-party apps can show if a number is potentially a spam or a business. it's handy when your phone number is listed in the business directory to avoid those annoying calls.
The only effective way to police this is to make the telco accountable and have a reporting system. Someone is terminating the calls and getting paid for doing it.
Automatic filtering on modern iOS has been a game changer here. Assume Android has something similar, but I can't speak highly enough of that one feature
I use SpamBlocker for filtering (available on F-Droid) to block calls, and with at least newish Samsung there is an option to hide blocked calls in the menu of the phone app.
I've got it configured to block on a country basis, with previous calls and contacts as a whitelist - that works for me.
How many door to door salesman do you encounter? Where do you live, if you can share?
I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.
On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.
Jehovah's Witnesses, across Europe, still even nowadays. Some other minor religious sects targeting elderly, usually offering care or attention followed by vicious takeover of real estate.
Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)
I'm pretty sure that would fall under freedom of religion rights, and it couldn't be banned. Especially as proselytizing is a well known and well established religious practice.
I know JWs go door to door but I don't think they sell anything nor do they ask for donations - all their stuff is free? To qualify as a salesman you'd have to be selling something, surely?
My local C of E cathedral sent out a mailshot during COVID asking for donations with a range from £50 - £1000 options on the card (yes, really). I've never had anything like that from JWs.
I get visits from the local air ambulance team looking for donations but I'd classify them as a charity, not a salesman. Even though the person is under contract (employed) to do the task of going door to door, it would be a charitable engagement and not a sale. I asked the last guy if he got commission - he said no.
I understand the sentiment but I don't understand why you're shouting a response at me; I was trying to highlight the difference between charities and salesmen.
I think your issue is with religion, not sales people, which is what this article is about.
Yes of course. But I was saying of the people I've had at my door, only some have been trying to sell things, which is what a "salesman" is.
The guy from the local baptist church gave me a some book about being saved by Jesus (it had instructions on how to pray I think? dunno threw it away) but he didn't ask me for any money.
By contrast, the Lithuanian girl who was trying to sell religious books (no idea who they were - some encyclopedias? it was very odd) was trying to sell them to me (nice girl, had come to this country and was living in a dorm? was confused why UK taps had hot/cold separately instead of a combined tap). The guys scamming me about a roof repair were definitely not doing it free. Nor were the guys trying to get me to switch internet provider, nor the guy offering me window replacement and double glazing, nor the woman selling me "lucky lavender", nor the guy selling sponges and cleaning products for tiny amounts of change.
That's what I was saying - people who ask for money or donations are salesmen. People who don't, aren't.
Nuisance religious callers and general unsolicited visitors is another topic. The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
What other kind of infantilizing laws do you purpose? Perhaps they should also make it illegal for people to interact with you if you find unpleasant? Ban small talk at checkouts?
There have actually been a number of band aids which have been fixing it. A few years ago I used to receive multiple malicious text messages and phone calls a day, then the Aus government cracked down on verification requirements for senders and I get zero.
I still get constant unsolicited sales calls but these are technically legal.
Spam is generally defined as "unwanted and/or unsolicited communication". Which I'm pretty sure an unsolicited sales call, from a genuine business, still is.
Current law forces them to use known phone number ranges and to my surprise they respect it. I'm using an app that blocks those ranges, I receive about 3 unsolicited calls per day they're all blocked. We even have a phone provider that can block them for you.
I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block
Are calls originating in France a major source of these unsolicited calls? According to the article, a lot of the calls are coming from Morocco, outside of their jurisdiction.
I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.
If a legitimate French business contracts with a Moroccon call center, they will then of course follow French law since the French business is liable.
As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago:
https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...
Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located. The industry generates a non-negligible part of Morocco's GDP and most of the clientele is from France. So yeah, Morocco may be right to be concerned by an eventual shrinking of the market.
The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.
So, this is specifically for telemarketing call, not scam call. In the context of telemarketing, it doesn't matter that the company call center is outsourced in other country. The company who contracted them are in France, trying to sell their business in France, they are responsible.
So if you get a telemarketing call from RandoCallCenterCo S.A trying to sell you on BusinessABC Ltd., they have been contracted by said company to do so and BusinessABC Ltd. will be on the hook.
I'd say the deregulation of the telephone industry in America, breaking up the baby Bells, etc would have probably been the biggest hand.
We broke everything up and let any old player enter the telco world over here which broke the entire sanctity of the security of the telephone network.
All calls at least appear with a Caller ID from France (+33). Are they really from france or just spoofing them is anyone's guess (not really, former French colonies in the Magrheb like Morocco make good money running call centers for French numbers).
Another distraction, probably useless in practice, and in typical French government fashion they carved out a number of exceptions including to sell you subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, because...
In my experience, GDPR works wonders here. After saying I do not wish my personal information to be processed and revoke any consents a few times I do not receive these calls anymore.
A business can call another business it there’s an existing relationship. This means you can introduce an upgrade, a new product line, or something unrelated to their current contract - but the contract needs to be there first.
Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
This kind of happens today, but I think the problem is too big. You'll need to employ thousands to process all the complaints and by the time you issue a fine, the company has closed and a new one has started.
What do you report to the police if the act isn't illegal?
I mean, everyone can call anyone and name any company already.
I haven't had too much trouble with telemarketers lately but there is a crowdsourced app in France called Saracroche that can be easily installed on your phone and blocks spam numbers by becoming the caller id service. You can also use the app to report a number and help build the huge database.
Alas, last time I checked numbers were something that was announced in-band, so it could be trivially faked by the caller. But I'm not sure if that's still true.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
For me, all unknown calls are screened. Which means if someone who’s not in my contacts calls me, they get some automatic voice saying something like “this is apple screen calling, please let me know who you are and why you are calling” The person calling then either hangs up or says something, if they say something I can see the live transcription and answer the call immediately if it’s important.
It’s been incredibly effective. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now with no complaints from anyone for not being able to reach me, and not once have I answered a scam call during that period.
I’ve had a few situations similar to what you describe, some service I’m using like a doctor, realestate agent etc called me and I immediately recognised who they are and why they are calling and answered.
All emergencies from unknown numbers that I can thank of will be from local numbers.
I personally answer all phone calls but I have very little of those spam calls (on average once a month perhaps?) And I have learned to just rudely stop the call without saying "sorry, I'm not interested".
There are places that list businesses, like the yellow pages of old, or place ads in publications that are relevant to the services or products you offer.
If you sell tires, and I don’t need tires, I don’t want to hear or see anything about tires.
You don't.
So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.
Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.
[0] https://lemagdelaconso.ouest-france.fr/dossier-2418-demarcha...
[1] https://communaute.orange.fr/t5/mon-telephone-par-internet-e...
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
E.g. in Finland the relevant regulation (https://traficom.fi/files/media/regulation/M_28_L_EN.pdf) says (in section 10):
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
And if that is a company that offers service of lending number for such calls, they deserve to suffer too
Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.
You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.
I'm 30+ and was trying to buy some wine yesterday, and was IDed and i'm clearly well over 18 yet they had to take the bottle back as I didn't carry my ID with me. Essentially the same thing with pubs/bars etc, you're clearly over 18 but there is a weird power trip yet in some raves/clubs you still see under 18s being let in.
And I don't think something being hard to enforce is reason enough to not do anything about it. If we truly care about something, we can always find a way.
Fun fact, Bloctel, the service that was supposed to allow us to ask not to be harassed, leaked last week... https://www.universfreebox.com/article/596529/piratage-de-bl...
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
The SMS are getting out of hand too, they send you a pre-recorded MP3 in addition to the picture too. At least they don't have enough information to know I don't have a letterbox.
> Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
Yeah, more and more French people are getting annoyed at it, esp. when companies always say "no worries no payment info leaked". I don't care, I can change my credit card but I can't change my personal informations.
And literally last week it's Bloctel that leaked! It's the government managed list of phone numbers that don't want to receive telemearketing calls, where anyone can add its own number to be excluded. Great idea on paper, goldmine of a data leak.
It's a number out of not so big pool of numbers. Spam caller can iterate every number in the country in a month
So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.
Especially on landlines mostly used by older people.
4-5 a day here.
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.
Assuming you can get access to their phone, only allowing calls from saved numbers would probably be the best solution, assuming she doesn't get random calls from hospitals and the like. If she's still using a landline though, that's a tough one to solve.
When it happens to me, they're met with silence or "GTFO" after the 3rd question. I am impolite.
Add in the fact that the person on the other end isn't even a human (it's not a human spam calling you; at best it's an automated call which get dumped on a human when it connects), and the whole thing gets even more absurd.
However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.
I've got it configured to block on a country basis, with previous calls and contacts as a whitelist - that works for me.
I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.
On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.
Norway.
Only because you have not been profiled as lone and vulnerable, doesn't mean the practice doesn't exist:)
My local C of E cathedral sent out a mailshot during COVID asking for donations with a range from £50 - £1000 options on the card (yes, really). I've never had anything like that from JWs.
I get visits from the local air ambulance team looking for donations but I'd classify them as a charity, not a salesman. Even though the person is under contract (employed) to do the task of going door to door, it would be a charitable engagement and not a sale. I asked the last guy if he got commission - he said no.
I think your issue is with religion, not sales people, which is what this article is about.
Because then a marketing person could say "but I'm only trying to make you aware of $PRODUCT; I'm not trying to sell it!"
The guy from the local baptist church gave me a some book about being saved by Jesus (it had instructions on how to pray I think? dunno threw it away) but he didn't ask me for any money.
By contrast, the Lithuanian girl who was trying to sell religious books (no idea who they were - some encyclopedias? it was very odd) was trying to sell them to me (nice girl, had come to this country and was living in a dorm? was confused why UK taps had hot/cold separately instead of a combined tap). The guys scamming me about a roof repair were definitely not doing it free. Nor were the guys trying to get me to switch internet provider, nor the guy offering me window replacement and double glazing, nor the woman selling me "lucky lavender", nor the guy selling sponges and cleaning products for tiny amounts of change.
That's what I was saying - people who ask for money or donations are salesmen. People who don't, aren't.
Nuisance religious callers and general unsolicited visitors is another topic. The article is about sales calls, not general nuisances.
* Jehovah's Witnesses
* people offering to steam clean my roof/drive
* the local Fibre company trying to sign me up.
* well known scammers who claim to be on some kind of prison release scheme selling overpriced kitchen/household tat
I am from India and I use Truecaller premium to filter calls. It has become a big head-ache, making us to miss important calls
I still get constant unsolicited sales calls but these are technically legal.
I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block
I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.
As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago: https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...
The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.
Anecdotally I’ve not heard as much about it being a problem in other places such as the UK.
We broke everything up and let any old player enter the telco world over here which broke the entire sanctity of the security of the telephone network.
But not everyone wants to be sorta legal.
Other than that, the business needs the call receipient to opt in. They can dop this on a webform, a physical form, or by initiating the contact and, say, leaving a message for the vendor asking to be called back. It means the business needs to concetrate on avenues other than cold calling for getting themselves in front of a prospect.