Rewardco - anothr call centre selling cell phone contracts...

I'm really frustrated at the number of calls I receive from noisy call centres with semi-literate people reading from scripts, trying to sell me a cell phone contract. I just received a call from Jevon at Rewardco who totally lied to me when he claimed he was not trying to sell me a new contract. After 10 minutes of listening to him read his script he admitted that in fact he had lied and he put the phone down on me. I get at least 1 of these per week and it's a complete waste of time. They tell me that they get my number from Vodacom but since this isn't an 'application provider' it doesn't appear to be covered by the WASPA code of conduct. What can we do about this? Is there not something that can protect a consumer from this voice spam (actually much more expensive to me than email spam).

Too many in the To

A colleague has a policy with Sanlam and today received an email from a 'Consultant'. He says in his email "In our endeavours to communicate more effectively, we make use of electronic communication via e-mail." Unfortunately, he sent the email to over 850 email addresses, in the 'To:' field*. It may not yet be illegal which I thought a pathetic irony, but is it? So what's to do about it? Please leave a comment.

*I believe that some email programs don't show more than the first few addresses. Those that do, show how much more bandwidth and space is used in the header, than the message itself.

Maybe the answer is that if you work in a big company, to tell the mail administrator to set alarms if someone tries to send 'to' more than 20 recipients. Use a mailing list broker (Vanilla do good business providing enterprise grade list services and education to ensure these remain legitimate).

SMS spam from Nedbank

The law is definitely flawed! I was certain that we could improve on it by getting some precedent but I'm no longer confident that it's going to happen.

Through ISOC-ZA I set up the Spammer Bounty Hunter programme (read more at http://wiki.isoc.org.za). The wiki refers to the legislation which states that "Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications to consumers, must provide the consumer— (a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the mailing list of that person; and (b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request of the consumer."

I was getting annoying sms spam from Nedbank and lodged a complaint with WASPA see the complaint form here. It was handled pretty well and although it didn't take the promised 7 days, they did finally remove me from their database and tell me where they obtained my telephone number. So effectively the complaint was resolved and they get off the hook.

More importantly the company who sold them my details is also off the hook. Seems like the law cannot touch them. Maybe there's something in the privacy legislation, I don't know. I had to expose them somehow and hope that you can assist me to take some action against ETL. I've tried to get in touch with a manager but they do not take or return calls (which I can understand too).