Call 793-847-8300 to complain about the Public Interest Communications Company directly and get your name removed from their list. They keep calling us - I say deluge them with calls. Here is my story:
I have been receiving the same aggravating calls. Today I picked up the phone on the second ring and got a recording saying "sorry we missed you." If you want your name taken off the list call us back. When you call back you get a recording asking for your phone number. This made me angry enough to search the companies website that is listed above. The Public Interest Communications Company does not evidently want you to call them. I did a websearch of their locations and found their "real" phone number
and spoke to a woman and told her how aggravating and inefficient their fund raising system is. I also told her I would be complaining to the group that released my information to them - Boston Symphony in the hopes that they will drop them as a contractor. Here is the website if anyone on this board wants to complain to a live human being -
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/charities/search_detail_cfr.aspx?cfr_id=248
Well, my phone is a CELL phone. And the Do Not Call exemptions (charity, politics, etc.) don't apply to cell phones. They are not to be called unsolicited EVER. Yet I get these calls from NUMEROUS numbers 5 and 6 times a day, if I'm lucky. There needs to be some way to identify cell phones so they are not called. Under some plans, people have to pay for incoming calls, plus it's ten times more annoying to get these calls while you're in the car, at lunch, at work, walking the dog, whatever, than it is to get them on your land line at home, sometimes many rooms away, often when you're not there.
It would be one thing if these people EVER left a freakin' message or a number to call back. But they don't. I do NOT answer my phone when I don't recognize the number. I figure if someone REALLY wants to talk to me, they'll leave a message. This phone used to be a land line and used to belong to my 3-years-deceased father. Most of the calls are really for him, and he can't answer them, obviously. If I ever got a live person, I could tell someone this, but ...
Some of these organizations I might be interested in donating to but not if they waste their money on this most annoying, frustrating and inefficient way to raise funds. If they can't call me directly or write me -- even e-mail me; I can usually recognize spam at a glance and hit the delete button -- or at least insist that their contractors use live people OR an automated message with contact info if you want to donate, so at least the person being solicited knows who's calling, then it doesn't exactly make me feel like donating to them.
As for the Do Not Call registry, I never got as many telemarketing calls pre-DNC as I get charity calls post-DNC. It's actually made things worse, in some ways. Every time I get one of these calls i do the reverse look-up thing, and almost all of them have comments indicating that someone asked to be taken off the list, and they WEREN'T. So I'm not sure how effective that is with the majority of these organizations. And that's assuming you take a lot of time out of your busy day to track these people down, get a contact number or e-mail addy and go to the trouble of requesting that your name be dropped. That's way more time and attention than this deserves. The burden should be on them. Every call should include an automated message if you don't answer, with information on how to stop the calls, and every call should be prefaced before it goes on, if you DO answer, with this: "I'm calling for X charity (not Charitable Calls Inc. or whatever the contractor is). If you wish to take calls from this charity, press 1; if you want to be contacted later, press 2; if you want to be TAKEN OFF THIS LIST permanently, press 3. If this is a cell phone and these kinds of calls are not allowed, press 4. If your name is not removed within X days, call 1-800-UR-IN-BIG-TROUBLE to file a complaint."