How to Reduce Junk-Mail, Spam & Telemarketing

1. Junk showing up in your USPS mailbox;
2. Spam and unsolicited email and
3. Telemarketing.

 The major credit bureaus, otherwise known as credit reporting agencies (“CRAs”), sell information about you to companies that want to mail you solicitations. Did you ask to have your time wasted and your home and mailbox cluttered up with useless debris? Fortunately, the federal government has required the CRAs to provide a website where you can go and “opt out” of receiving some of this junk. Go to: www.optoutprescreen.com and follow the instructions. It only takes a few minutes, and you will be taken off some of these mailing lists for at least 5 years. After opting out, you should begin to notice less junk showing up in your mailbox. The site also gives you the option to opt out permanently. 

 Now go to www.dmachoice.org to reduce even more the useless junk that shows up in your mailbox. This site is set up by a trade organization called the “Direct Marketing Association,” and the website provides a variety of opt-out options, including for junk email. By following the simple instructions on this site, you can be removed from many more mailing lists. 

Federal regulations have required the following for commercial email: identification—the email must be clearly identified as a solicitation or advertisement for products or services; opt-out methods—the email must provide easily accessible, legitimate, and free ways for you to reject future messages from that sender; and return address—the email must contain legitimate return email addresses as well as the sender’s postal address. Similar rules apply to faxes. The fax must provide a return number at which you can opt out of receiving any future faxes from that particular sender. Many state laws allow you to sue the senders of junk email for “statutory” monetary damages plus court costs and attorney fees if you have previously told the sender not to email you, and they do so again. See, for example, State of New Mexico statutes 57-12-23 and 57-12-24.

If you have not already done so, Go to www.donotcall.gov and register all your phone numbers. That said, unfortunately most professional telemarketers could not care less about the National Do Not Call Registry. They have no respect for the rule of law or your privacy and desire to not be harassed by them. If you have been bothered too often by telemarketers you already know I am preaching to the choir.

 The best way to reduce harassing telemarketing calls is to sue telemarketers. For more on that subject, go to: I SUE TELEMARKETERS The main reason I recommend listing all your phone numbers on the National Do-Not-Call Registry at www.donotcall.gov, is that doing so increases the legal liability of the companies who choose to harass you with their unlawful calls anyway. If I am hired to sue them, I can make them pay more money for calling numbers listed on the Registry than I can for numbers that were not listed on the Registry. 

 There is “a real do-not-call list” that is passed around inside the telemarketing industry. While the industry generally just ignores www.donotcall.gov, there is a real do-not-call list that the smarter telemarketers take seriously: the lists of people who sue telemarketers. Believe it or not, there are people of very low moral character out there who, as an occupation, research and compile lists of people who have actually sued telemarketers. Then they sell their lists to telemarketers, proclaiming that they can help telemarketers continue to illegally robocall and harass millions of people on a regular basis while reducing the risk of being sued. I think of these types of people as co-conspirators in criminal enterprises. So again, the best way to reduce the number of telemarketing calls you receive is to start suing telemarketers so that you get on the do-not-call lists some telemarketers actually take seriously. Being made to pay money for dialing phone numbers listed on the National Do-Not-Call Registry is what sinks into their thick little brains. 

 If you live in New Mexico or Texas and are fed up with commercial activity that invades even your home and private life uninvited, such as junk emails and telemarketers who ignore the National Do-Not-Call Registry, contact Attorney Sidney Childress at Schedule a Consultation about the matter. I Sue Telemarketers see also How to Sue Telemarketers