alt Hacker News> From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
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100% agree. When I said scam above, I meant the obviously illegal fraudulent scams (like the "We're MS, and see you have a virus, please give us your CC info and let us remote into your desktop" stuff).
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
I think the point is that there is a distinction between calls that are intrusive spam or arguably scams but not already illegal, and calls where the content of the call is itself unambiguously illegal.
Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.
A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.