WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission Monday told telemarketers that they must make arrangements to obtain mobile-phone numbers because it is illegal to use autodialers to call wireless phones.
“A telemarketer may make appropriate arrangements with a user to obtain the data in a manner that best meets its business needs. Consistent with the approach adopted by the commission to rely on the telemarketing industry to select solutions that best fit telemarketers’ needs, I anticipate that you will review the Nov. 21 letter from NeuStar Inc. and the options it presents to make available the information required to determine that a wireline number has been ported to a wireless service,” said K. Dane Snowden, chief of the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, noting that NeuStar had sent a letter that better explains the options available to telemarketers to ensure that mobile-phone numbers are not called by autodialers.
Snowden was responding to concerns of the Direct Marketing Association. It has been illegal for nearly a decade to place telemarketing calls to mobile phones but it became harder for telemarketers to comply once the FCC ruled in favor of wireline-to-wireless portability.
“DMA’s current Wireless Suppression Service list will continue to function as it does currently for new numbers that are issued to wireless carriers. That will not eliminate the problem that arises with intermodal porting,” said Jerry Cerasale, DMA senior vice president, in a letter last month to the FCC. “It will become a very real problem if marketers are unable to identify numbers that are newly ported from wireline to wireless service. In short, our members will not know-and they will have no way of knowing-that they not place autodialed calls to such numbers.”
