THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 25, 1996 TAG: 9610250543
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 57 lines
People tired of getting calls from telemarketers may be able to put a stop to the intrusions under legislation that Sen. Frederick M. Quayle plans to propose during the next General Assembly session.
Quayle, R-Chesapeake, wants to create the Telephone Privacy Act. The legislation would establish a registry of people who do not want to receive unsolicited telephone calls and require phone companies to notify customers of the list. It would give enforcement powers to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
The bill is Quayle's response to complaints from some of his elderly constituents about telemarketers.
``One of the major complaints is all the unsolicited calls they receive trying to sell them things,'' Quayle said, ``and being elderly, they sometimes don't have the resistance they need to turn things down.''
Quayle's bill is similar to existing federal law, said Pat Crane, spokeswoman with ICT Group, a telemarketing company with three offices in Hampton Roads.
``If they say, `I don't want to be talked to and I don't want you to ever call me again,' '' Crane said, ``we are obligated by federal law to never call them again and put them on a don't-call list.''
Two years ago, Congress passed the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act. Under that act, the Federal Trade Commission adopted the Telemarketing Sales Rule, which became effective at the end of last year.
Under that law, telemarketers can not phone people before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. They are also required to immediately identify the seller, and to maintain ``do not call'' lists.
Drew Lankford, a representative of Hampton Roads Legislative Advocacy Network, works with the senior services agency SEVAMP, and said that that organization has a person who works with fraud and abuse of the elderly. A good portion ``of time is spent combatting telemarketing fraud,'' he said.
People who make efforts to curb such fraud, though, should be careful not to interfere with others who use the phone to help the elderly, he said. Lankford said SEVAMP does a lot of phoning to keep the elderly informed.
``It's good if it protects them from some of the fraud schemes out here,'' he said, ``but we also contact our members by phone sometimes.''
The Telephone Privacy Act may cause some work for the phone companies to notify their customers of the registry, Quayle said, but with the automation available it shouldn't be much of a burden.
Paul Miller, a spokesman for Bell Atlantic Corp., said that if the General Assembly imposes the requirement on ``the phone company'' it should be sure to impose it on all phone companies - not just Bell Atlantic and GTE.
And Quayle said some senior citizens may like getting the telemarketing offers, in which case they can just not register for the list.
``I suspect most of the elderly who get these calls do not succumb to them,'' he said, ``but it's the annoyance of getting them all the time.'' ILLUSTRATION: State Sen. Frederick M. Quayle will propose a bill
called the Telephone Privacy Act next year.
KEYWORDS: TELEMARKETING PROPOSAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY by CNB