Numerous complaints have been made by consumers against telemarketers who have continued to call them. Faced with the consequences under the new regulations, telemarketing organizations are forced to delete the numbers on the national registry from their records.
And yet, many calls are still getting through. As of this article's post date, over 34,000 violation complaints have been lodged against the FTC. The FTC, for its part, is investigating the complaints and will presumably be handing out fines shortly.
The success of the do-not-call list is, of course, prompting many people to back the do-not-email list idea. I've covered this before in other articles on this site, but the main points deserve repeating: the do-not-call list idea works because telemarketers can't hide their phone numbers from the FTC.
The do-not-email list idea will fail for the same reason: spam is nearly impossible to trace.
Nearly 28,000 telemarketing organizations have accessed the Registry,
with 628 telemarketers downloading all area codes in the Registry.
The Do Not Call Registry, which opened for consumer registrations on
June 27, 2003, currently contains 53.7 million telephone numbers.
Telemarketers began accessing the Registry on September 2, 2003, through
a Web site specifically developed for telemarketers,
www.telemarketing.donotcall.gov.
For enforcement purposes, consumer complaints received into the FTC
database are made available to more than 800 law enforcement agencies,
including the offices of all State Attorneys General.