Telemarketer-Bashing Spreads Across Internet
By Leslie Gornstein
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
FORT WORTH --
Telemarketers have learned a disturbing new truth: The Internet hates them.
Some World Wide
Web sites are encouraging consumers to play practical jokes on
telephone salespeople. Other cyber-citizens have dreamed up games
where players earn points by frustrating the callers or getting them
to use profanity.
"It seems
humorous on the surface, but we are in business to do business,"
said Jim Tressler, senior vice president of operations for TeleQuest,
an Arlington-based telemarketing company, yesterday.
Some of the Web
sites are just plain harsh.
"If you are a
telemarketer," warns one page operated by an America Online
customer, "die."
The telemarketing
industry is getting wise to the plethora of hostile Internet sites --
Tressler says he has found more than 900 -- and is hoping to fight
them. At a seminar yesterday for area telemarketers, Tressler gave
participants a generous sample of the hate and encouraged them to
broadcast a more positive message.
"This is just another way, through the back fence, of spewing false information and half-truths," Tressler said. "It's an emotional thing with me. I have earned my living this way, and I really don't know what to do about this."
At one site, Internet user Vince Nestico of Eastpointe, Mich., offers what he calls "telemarketer-tormenting techniques." For example, consumers receiving a call from a cleaning company are encouraged to ask: "Do you get goat's blood out?"
"If it's a
brassy woman asking for my wife, I tell her that my wife is not
permitted to talk to strangers," Nestico says on the site.
"They usually get real indignant."
Nestico even advises ways to get rid of "charity collecting scum."
"He ought to
get a life," mumbled one member of Tressler's audience yesterday.
Nestico could not
be reached for comment yesterday.
But Bob Bulmash,
president of Private
Citizen,
an anti-telemarketing group in Naperville, Ill., said callers are
only getting what they deserve.
"Telemarketing is invasive and sociopathic," said Bulmash, who operates an online consumer education site about telemarketing. "If they feel this is bashing, it gives me a feeling of how far the industry is from reality, how thickheaded they are."
Tressler
acknowledged yesterday that his industry, whose sales and employment
figures are growing at an estimated 20 percent a year, must police
itself to fight telemarketing fraud. But he expressed worry that the
hate sites will turn off potential employees or customers.
"A lot of
people, hearing that information, will draw conclusions that will
create bias," Tressler said.
But Bulmash sees
things differently. As long as they are lawful, Internet sites should
be able to say whatever they want about telemarketing, he said.
Fraudulent or lawful, all telemarketers are wrong, he said.
"Was the
South supposed to be polite to the Union army as it swept in?"
Bulmash said. "This is residential privacy warfare. Is it
Nazi-bashing to say Nazis are crumbs?"
© 1997 Fort
Worth Star-Telegram