Robot and call center call with unknown numbers at each hour, to sell, persuade and sometimes defraud. An long -standing theme that cannot be resolved because the affairs of the harassers are larger than the fines received (and the law does not reach foreign operators). Now six bill proposals try to stem the phenomenon, but even so it may not be enough.
Anyone who has a phone has experienced the annoying insistence of telemarketing. Call at any time, unknown numbers that appear on the display with unwanted commercial proposals recited by robots or insisted from humans (perhaps with “very advantageous” and incomprehensible formulas), unlikely promotions and offers that multiply, even when it has expressly asked for the cancellation from the databases. This is despite the fact that for three years in Italy citizens can ask for the registration of their number to Opposition register (RPO) And avoid – so it should be – unwanted phone calls from companies.
Reading the official numbers would almost seem that the register is working: 31 million registrations made to date. But according to various experts and consumer associations, the cases in which the register shield is easily bypassed by companies that continue with aggressive telemarketing are not rare. The result is alarming: today in Italy, where over 110 million voice cards are active, each citizen receives almost two calls per day by the call center on average. A phenomenon that has become literally unsustainable.
Yet the system initially conceived (it ran the year 2022) could have made sense. The mechanism is quite simple: those who do not want to be disturbed by dozens and dozens of telemarketing phone calls can request the registration of their mobile number (or fixed network). This list is compared from time to time with the telephone numbers lists in possession of an operator (a company, or a call center), before you start a promotion campaign. It would be an obligatory passage, necessary to prevent the operator from contacting numbers “prohibited” by the legitimate owner, thus doting a fine by the guarantor.
The point, however, is that many continue to resort to wild telemarketing Because “they see immediate results in terms of sales, even if in the long term it can damage the company’s reputation and alienate the” customers-plays “” explains to Panorama Giovanni Spiller, partner and AFC of Dataz, performance marketing company based in Milan.
But above all, the RPO shield is less totally at the moment when a company turns to a call center located abroad: in these cases “the register proves to be ineffective because the calls come from jurisdictions where the Italian standards are not applicable. And in fact those who pay the consequences are consumers »adds Spiller.
In short, a total failure that obviously entails a disbursement: in fact, it is a private but public law entity, the Ugo Bordoni Foundation, which is financed by the State with a “preventive plan of the management costs” of the register. A plan that for 2025 provided for an expense of approximately 1.3 million euros.
An evident disaster also going to scroll through the thousands of comments from the social pages of the register of oppositions. «What is the public register of oppositions for? For courtesy, give me an answer that convinces me, because it is not possible that despite being enrolled for years, now, the amount of unwanted calls not mentioned not to fall », someone writes. «It’s a total disgust. I did dozens of reports but the spam continues »replies another. «I confirm that I too, despite enrolled in the RPO, continue to receive daily a day, insistent phone calls. Impossible to block them! »… it’s all like this: a long sequence of complaints for an instrument that does not work.
It is no coincidence that Parliament is now also working to understand how to stem the phenomenon of aggressive telemarketing. In a method certainly different from the past, as explained by Gianluca Di Ascenzo del Codacons: “We record the involvement of all the actors in the supply chain, the only way to harmonize the current legislation”. The role played by AGCOM is central, whose technical work is hoped can mean in the meantime to counteract and prohibit the so -called “spoofing”, the falsification of the identity of the caller (one number rather than another), a phenomenon that is also the basis of many recent cases of fraud.
All this, however, may not be enough. At the moment, six bills are under discussion in the rooms, which Emmanuela Bertucci, ADUC’s lawyer (Association for the rights of users and consumers), studied in detail. His position is clear: «I find them ineffective. The point is not to increase the sanctions (There would be 20 to 30 million euros or from 4 percent to 6 percent of the turnover, ed): they already exist and are applied in the maximum amounts, but even so they cannot be a deterrent ». And it does not even count, as someone has proposed, the current register of oppositions into a register of consensus (“one does not work, it is not clear why the other should do it”). Nor would the further obligations of transparency and verification of consensus (the PD, for example, proposed to establish a prefix to recognize commercial calls), for a simple reason according to Dr. Bertucci: “If the existing rules were respected, wild telemarketing would not exist”. In short, all the work so far carried out risks being, for the umpteenth time, not very effective.
That’s why there are those who look at the examples that come from abroad. Various consumer associations, but also public bodies (the Arera spoke of it, the Authority of regulation of light and gas, in parliamentary hearing) look to Spain where a proposal is under discussion that prohibits – limited to contracts relating to the provision of electricity – both telemarketing and Teleselling (allowing you to enter into telephone contracts only if the initiative starts from the consumer). An idea that does not mind, for example, to the pentastellata Senator Sabrina Licheri, which has always been attentive to the phenomenon: “that of the cancellation of contracts that occurred through calls could be an extra tool to stop this phenomenon that has lived from people as an act harmful to their personal freedom”, he explains.
Emmanuela Bertucci is also of equal notice, according to which it is “the best solution among those proposed so far. In this way, consumers would finally be free from the harassment of dozens of daily calls of call center that offer contracts of light, gas, telephony, investments in cryptocurrencies, online trading, water purifiers and would no longer be adapted by accepting scam contracts “. In short, after three years of bankruptcy, a concrete solution – perhaps, hopefully – is close.
