My last name can be something of a challenge to pronounce (Sko-blee-onk-ov) and a brain twister to spell. So, in consideration of people who may want to contact me, I’ve listed my phone number in the telephone directory under my name, as well as the more whimsical, unforgettable and mnemonic alias: “Peter Pan.”
Over the years, I’ve gotten my share of prank phone calls — adolescents identifying themselves as “Captain Hook,” asking for “Tinker Bell,” that sort of thing. I’ll respond as “Wendy,” and we both usually crack up in laughter before hanging up.
But in recent years, the benefits of having a phone book alter ego have been outweighed by the growing annoyance of telemarketers targeting the Asian immigrant community. The phone will ring during dinner, and when I answer I’m greeted with a long marketing pitch in Chinese — the only words I recognize are “Mr. Pan.” Worse, as the callers rarely speak English, they can’t even get the joke.
Then, on a Friday evening in late August, I received a call (in English) from my long-distance provider, MCI WorldCom. Dismissing it as yet another telemarketing call offering me “additional services,” I instructed the woman not to call again. But just as I was about to hang up, she explained that she was calling to inform me that I was no longer a customer of MCI.
What? For not taking her sales call?
No, according to her records, I had changed my long-distance service provider two days before and she was calling to verify it.
Her words sunk in: I’d been slammed.
Grrrrr.
Slamming is the sleazy byproduct of intense competition unleashed by deregulation of the telephone industry; it’s an illegal practice in which unscrupulous and unethical long-distance telephone carriers switch someone’s preferred provider without their knowledge or consent.
Unfortunately, she could not provide me with the name of the company that slammed me. For that I’d have to wait until the weekend was over and request the information from my local phone company.
When I called Verizon a few days later to learn the identity of the new long distance provider that I had supposedly authorized to provide my service, it turned out to be Qwest — the upstart telecommunications company based in Denver, Colo., that recently merged with US West. Sitting on a newly laid 18,500-mile, high-speed fiber optic network, Qwest has — in a remarkably short time period — grown to be the fourth-largest long-distance carrier in the nation, and that’s merely a quarter of its business as a broadband, Internet-based telecom.
So I called Qwest. The company representative I spoke to confidently assured me that the change had been properly authorized. In fact, he could prove it to me by accessing a tape recording of the actual conversation.
Then he let out a chuckle. “What’s your name?”
I told him.
“Well then, who’s Peter Pan?”
The tape recording we listened to revealed a man with a distinctly urban, African-American accent claiming to be “Peter Pan,” who agreed to have his (my!) telephone service changed to Qwest. “Yeah, yeah,” he said hurriedly when asked if he was responsible for authorizing the change.
Who was this mystery Peter Pan? Had Qwest purposefully faked the authorization? Or was it someone’s ideas of a prank? I still don’t know for sure — but I did learn later that Qwest has been repeatedly fined for questionably authorized slamming, even as it claims, at an executive level, to have “zero tolerance” for such abuses.
Like most of the new fiber optic telecom giants, Qwest projects an image of cutting-edge, high-tech glamour. Qwest is all about the future — a future in which everyone will have more bandwidth than they know what to do with, a future in which Internet connectivity will be as natural as breathing. And like all the telecoms, Qwest prides itself on being responsive to “customer” needs. So why did it need to “slam” me?
Slamming first occurred shortly after 1985, when equal access to the newly deregulated long-distance telephone industry was first granted. But it soared to epidemic rates after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was in part designed to deter such practices. In June 1998, the Federal Communications Commission testified before Congress that slamming was the No. 1 complaint it heard from consumers; the commission practically begged the government for stronger regulatory powers to combat the problem. The FCC was overwhelmed: Complaints about slamming had jumped 175 percent, from 16,000 in 1996 to 44,000 in 1997.
“Because most slammed consumers grin and bear it, we don’t know how many of the 50 million carrier selection changes each year result from slamming,” testified FCC commissioner Susan Ness in 1997. “If just 1 percent were slamming changes — a very conservative estimate — that would total over 500,000 slamming incidents each year.”
In 1997, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal estimated that slamming cost consumers more than $100 million annually. “These unscrupulous companies are nothing more than electronic pickpockets who not only scam consumers but siphon business from legitimate long-distance carriers,” he said.
Members of the National Telephone Cooperative Association, a nonprofit representing more than 500 small, locally owned telecommunications companies in rural areas, have consistently found that when they called to verify customers’ changes nearly 50 percent of all carrier change orders were fraudulent.
Anti-slamming legislation has been introduced in Congress but consistently gets put on hold while the telecommunications industry promises to regulate itself. Why the lack of action? Probably for the same reason that motivates slammers: greed. According to Common Cause, in the last election cycle (Jan. 1, 1999, to June 30, 2000) the telecommunications industry was the second largest contributor of soft money donations (behind the securities and investment industries), giving away a total of $17.7 million.
The FCC finally got tough last year, establishing new rules and taking action against slammers. In October 1999, it proposed slapping Qwest with a $2.08 million fine for slamming abuses. According to an FCC report, between Sept. 1, 1998, and Aug. 31, 1999, “the Commission’s Common Carrier Bureau processed 637 written consumer complaints alleging slamming by Qwest, and 551 written complaints alleging slamming by LCI [which had recently been acquired by Qwest]. During the same period, the Commission’s National Call Center received 1,142 consumer calls regarding unauthorized changes by Qwest and 218 regarding such changes by LCI.”
Among the complaints cited was a Riverside, Calif., woman whose husband, Qwest claimed, had authorized the switch. The only problem was her husband had been dead for eight years. Another individual was shocked to learn that Qwest had a “signed” authorization form from his deceased dog, Boris. The man had listed his phone number under his dog’s name for privacy reasons.
In 22 cases, the FCC claimed forgeries or “otherwise falsified letters of authorization” were involved. Among the names of the complainants were a disproportionate number of Asian names, such as Wu, Tso, Yau, Tien, Yun, Lan and Shing.
In November 1999 Qwest appealed the fine, announcing that it was cracking down on slamming practices.
“We have always had a zero-tolerance for slamming,” said Joseph P. Nacchio, Qwest’s chairman and CEO, in a press release that unveiled a “hard-line,” long-term program aimed at detecting and eliminating the practice by company agents, distributors and other third-party representatives.
Meanwhile states began enacting their own anti-slamming laws. At least 10 states independently filed charges against Qwest. Many states negotiated settlements in which the company doesn’t acknowledge wrongdoing. Oklahoma and Michigan settled for mere slaps on the wrist, $30,000 and $40,000 respectively; Arizona settled for $175,000; Minnesota extracted a $500,000 civil penalty from Qwest for a slew of deceptive marketing abuses. All of these fines amount to a pittance for a corporation that expects to achieve $18.5 billion in revenue and $7.4 billion in earnings for 2000.
But the allegations of racial profiling against Asians and Latinos by Qwest are the most disturbing. Minority immigrants are particularly susceptible to consumer fraud and reluctant to seek redress.
Michigan’s Public Service Commission filed complaints against Qwest in 1999 on behalf of seven individuals with the last names of Le, Ha, Nguyen, Pung, Martinez and Sanchez. But most of those complaints were later dropped, according to a PSC press release, “at their request, due to settlements with Qwest for undisclosed amounts of money.”
In November 1999, Connecticut specifically charged Qwest with targeting Latino- and Asian-surnamed consumers for unauthorized switching of their long-distance carriers and billing for unauthorized services.
“Repeatedly and recklessly, Qwest has unlawfully targeted and slammed Latino and Asian consumers. This wrongdoing is consumer abuse at its worst,” announced Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal when he brought charges against the company. “We will take every possible step to ensure that Qwest acts responsibly and pays penalties for its past defiance of our laws.”
The lawsuit seeks tens of thousands of dollars in restitution and hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties.
In response, Qwest issued a press release denying the charges that “it targeted Asian and Latino customers,” adding that “it does not believe that there are proceedings against the company in the states of Florida and Texas.”
On July 21, nine months after it had called for the $2 million fine against Qwest, the FCC announced that it had reached an agreement with Qwest: The company would pay the government a $1.5 million settlement.
In a press release dated July 21, Qwest described the resolution as a “voluntary payment.” Through this settlement, the release continued, “the FCC has endorsed Qwest’s anti-slamming initiatives … Qwest’s anti-slamming policy becomes a model for others in the industry to combat slamming … Since the policy’s enactment [in 1999], Qwest has terminated more than 25 sales agents and/or telemarketing agencies that filed false orders. In addition, slamming incidents have dropped to levels in line with industry average.”
Earlier this month, I contacted Qwest as a reporter to ask about its slamming policies. In response, I was faxed a copy of the November 1999 press release that announced the “zero-tolerance” policy by Nacchio and its efforts to eliminate the practice of customer slamming by company agents.
When I recounted my own experience, Qwest spokesperson Matt Barkett said, “No system is foolproof; you’re going to have instances where mistakes are made.”
As for targeting Asians and Latinos, Barkett explained that it is standard industry practice to market to immigrant populations.
“It makes sense from a business viewpoint to market to ethnic communities,” he said. “And with our outreach programs to non-English-speaking people, we try and reduce confusion by backing up our efforts with people who speak their native tongue and produce promotional materials in these languages.”
In the meantime, I still haven’t heard back from the FCC regarding a complaint I filed about the slamming incident, and I’m also scratching my head trying to figure out the new charges on my monthly telephone bill. But I have decided that it’s time for Peter Pan to grow up. I’m searching for a new nom de phone, something a little more intimidating than a boy who won’t grow up — like Darth Vader, or maybe better yet, Ralph Nader.
In December, nine prominent Internet activists from the United States and Canada arrived in Washington for a secret meeting with officials from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). The activists’ message: Stop spamming, please.
For five hours straight, the activists — founding members of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE) and representatives from various Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and software developers, including Microsoft — tried to impress upon the DMA’s honchos why they should shun unsolicited junk e-mail. They tried to educate the marketers about the economic and ethical issues of “cost-shifted advertising” (whereby the recipient pays), and about the threat that unbridled spam poses to consumers’ privacy, to companies’ private property rights and to the cooperative culture of the Internet. And they hoped that an agreement could be reached that would reduce spam without government intervention.
The Spam Summit, bringing together as it did some vocal adversaries, was often contentious, but a joint press release composed at the meeting’s end showed evidence of consensus. Both groups agreed to a set of recommendations, including support for legislation prohibiting false identification in commercial e-mail; both also acknowledged that “opt-in” (whereby commercial e-mail is sent only to people who have opted to receive it) is the most successful way for online marketers to target consumers, and agreed to create a nonprofit global “opt-out” list, which would allow individuals and companies to register that they did not want to receive unsolicited e-mail.
But it seems the truce was short-lived. In recent days, the DMA has praised the potential of spam and lauded the success of the Net’s self-regulation. The activists, meanwhile, admit that this may be the moment to give in to something they never wanted — government regulation. No one is eager to invite Uncle Sam to oversee the Net, but anti-spammers — angered by what they consider to be an about-face by the DMA — concede they don’t know how else to stem the flow of unsolicited e-mail.
“We tried repeatedly to show them how they could have their cake and eat it too — that opt-in marketing is a win-win situation for the DMA and consumers,” says Nick Nicholas, the executive director of the Mail Abuse Prevention System, which operates the Real-time Blackhole List (RBL) — a blacklist of Internet addresses known to send spam. “But,” he posted to an anti-spam newsgroup, “the DMA has shown that they are untrustworthy and completely lacking in integrity.”
Of course, no one ever expected that a direct-marketing organization would agree to anything like a ban on spam, or would denounce an advertising opportunity. But the activists had high hopes that they could convince the marketers to limit commercial e-mail, targeting only those who request it.
The DMA, however, sounds quite excited about the possibilities opened up by the Internet. DMA president and CEO Robert Wientzen touted the use of unsolicited commercial e-mail as a “powerful marketing tool” at the association’s 82nd annual conference last month in Toronto. And in congressional testimony last week, DMA Senior Vice President for Government Affairs Jerry Cerasale lauded the success of the marketing industry’s efforts at self-regulation. Last week, the DMA also announced the launch of a global remove list — but one that does not allow ISPs to opt out their own domains.
“I’m not terribly surprised about their about-face, but I’m most appalled by their dishonesty,” says Nicholas. “My breath is taken away by how blatantly they turned around and have done and said completely different things.”
Other participants in last year’s meeting echoed his sentiments. “I am really dismayed that they seem to have done a complete about-face from the assurances they gave us at the Spam Summit a year ago,” said John Levine, author of the bestselling “Internet for Dummies” book. “When we met, one of the things we agreed was that opt-in was by far the best way to do advertising. But now, both in Wientzen’s remarks at the convention and [Cerasale's] testimony on the Hill, they’ve said they want to do opt-out advertising.”
The DMA says that it has not broken any promises. It maintains that the agreement reached at the Spam Summit concerned recommendations, not necessarily specific actions; the group didn’t leave the summit with a directive to change direct marketers’ business methods, but with a sense of a mutual comprehension. As Pat Faley, vice president for ethics and consumer affairs, put it: “We understood their position and they understood ours.”
Faley was quick to dismiss any notion of an agreement about opt-in marketing. “As a legal principle, we maintain the right of commercial free speech,” Faley explained. “If you’re a small business trying to get off the ground, the only way to do that is to reach out and let people know what products you have, to offer it to the world on the Internet. That’s why we say that a marketer should be able to let consumers know what they have to offer them; and then if a consumer says ‘I don’t want to hear from you again,’ a marketer should respect that. It’s the ‘one bite at the apple’ approach.”
Still, it sounds as if the DMA is aware of making some commitments at the summit. When asked about the DMA’s support for anti-spam legislation, Faley produced DMA testimony from a June 1998 congressional hearing (six months before the Spam Summit), endorsing legislation to combat electronic fraud.
Faley was particularly proud of the DMA’s compliance with the agreement to create a global opt-out list. The e-mail preference service (or e-mps), which has been in the planning stage for more than a year, will maintain a list of e-mail addresses whose owners have registered a preference to not receive unsolicited commercial e-mail. Marketers can then compare their mailing lists with the e-mps database and cleanse their list of those who have requested to be removed.
The service will be launched on Jan. 10, 2000, and all DMA members will be required to use it. The DMA’s nearly 4,600 members will have access to the list at no charge, but non-members will have to pay $100 annually for unlimited use. If a good chunk of the more than 22 million small businesses in the United States decide to use the list, it could become a great source of revenue for the DMA. If, however, small businesses balk at paying a fee to find out who not to advertise to, the list will hardly fulfill its mission of giving consumers the option to be left off mass mailings.
While arguments could be made that the DMA has turned a consumer rights issue into a proprietary service, what really has activists seeing red is how the DMA has configured the opt-out list: It will not allow ISPs to opt out for their own domains. Faley cited concerns that allowing ISPs to opt out would restrict the rights of individual consumers — those consumers who would choose to receive commercial e-mail.
“The truth is that ISPs have the ability right now to stop bulk e-mail,” Faley added. “They have technological systems that can detect mass influxes of e-mail from one location and can stop them. ISPs don’t need an e-mail preference service.”
But some ISPs beg to differ. “That’s patently wrong,” said Afterburner, the abuse manager for large regional ISP Erols/RCN. “But even if it were possible, why should the burden of blocking unwanted e-mail fall upon the recipients?”
It certainly doesn’t make sense to Rodney Joffe, a self-described “marketing geek” who has been a card-carrying member of the DMA for nearly 20 years — and is also a passionate anti-spammer. “I believe that the way the Internet has developed is opposed to the way the marketers want to shape it,” says Joffe, who organized the Spam Summit.
Two months prior to that meeting, Joffe had created an e-mail preference service called SAFE-eps to rival the DMA’s planned service. Unlike the DMA’s e-mps, SAFE-eps had the support of the Internet community and allowed domain-wide opt-out, including for ISPs. Among its first registrants were America Online and Microsoft’s Hotmail. He had hoped that the DMA would adopt his approach — but it didn’t work out that way.
“The DMA position is arrogant and absolutely untenable,” says Joffe, “by taking this [opt-out] position, the DMA is undermining the fundamental principles of the Internet — specifically by shifting the costs of advertising onto the recipient and not allowing ISPs to control their own destiny.”
Joffe had planned the Spam Summit quietly, to avoid the wrath of the legions of spam-hating netizens who consider their personal computers to be private property (unlike postal mailboxes, which are technically owned by the government) and see the proponents of opt-out marketing as criminal trespassers. But now that the marketers have failed to honor what the anti-spam lobbyists considered a mutual agreement, Joffe predicts dire consequences:
“I’m terribly distressed by this. I’d hoped that logic and good sense would prevail and that it wouldn’t come to this. We tried to explain that although we were only nine individuals, we spoke for hundreds of thousands of people. There have been mumbling and grumbling until now, but this will turn out to be the pivotal point by which the DMA and Internet community at large will finally go head to head. This will be the catalyst which will begin the war at large between the Internet and the DMA.
Some anti-spammers, who have loosely grouped themselves under the name the Lumber Cartel, are already calling for retaliation against the DMA and its members. If the DMA condones the use of unsolicited commercial e-mail, these activists reason, they can turn the tables and target the DMA and its members with “exciting news and opportunities” of their own. Others are calling for a boycott of all DMA members, including IBM, AT&T and others. (Microsoft, which sat on the anti-spammer side of the table at the summit, is also a DMA member.) One anti-spammer has already proposed a software program called “Pandora’s Box,” which would automate the process of responding to unsolicited commercial e-mail by targeting executives from the company that sent the spam.
But Nicholas and other anti-spam lobbyists advise against fighting abuse with abuse. “Our only recourse is to go right over their heads to approach Congress and let them know that the Internet community has met with marketers in an effort to help self-regulate, but the DMA has reneged on every promise it made,” he says.
Joffe agrees. “Federal legislation is anathema to the Internet culture, and we were hoping that it will get solved without federal interference,” he said. “But we now know that we need the weight and power of law behind us. It’s the only way to control spam.”
Ray Everett-Church, a founding member of CAUCE and chief privacy officer and vice president of public policy at Alladvantage.com, has already been working with Congress to help craft such legislation. There are currently four different anti-spam bills before Congress, and Everett-Church is advising members of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection on the issues and their implications. One bill, the Can Spam Act, would give ISPs the right to post notice that they do not accept spam and to sue spammers who violate their wishes; it would also create criminal penalties for hijacking domain names when sending spam.
“I think that ultimately we’ll see legislation that will combine the best of all current pending legislation, that gives both consumers and ISPs means of protecting themselves from unwanted ads, and gives them legal recourse if their wishes are not respected. That’s the bottom line,” Everett-Church says.
Meanwhile, visitors to the DMA’s annual conference last month reported seeing booths and exhibits displaying products that would facilitate spamming — and violate certain state laws — including a computer program to help marketers “guess” at individuals’ e-mail addresses by generating variations of a person’s name.
“The only conclusion I can draw from the apparent interest in these services is that the direct marketing industry still doesn’t understand why unsolicited commercial e-mail is a bad idea for all involved,” author Levine wrote in a press release earlier this month. “Flooding the network with unsolicited commercial e-mail is as damaging to the sender as it is to the recipient. Understanding this is the first step towards understanding how to take advantage of the promise of permission-based online marketing.”
Spam has long been employed by unprofessional and unethical business people (referred to by anti-spammers as “chickenboners” — an epithet synonymous with “trailer trash,”
or someone who gnaws on fried chicken and throws the bones in the back of the trailer) to tout scams, porn sites or the latest way to “fire the boss and kill the alarm clock.” But in recent months, some legitimate businesses have been charged with venturing into the sticky swamp of junk e-mailers — among them Amazon.com, Harper Collins, and RealNetworks.
DMA president Wientzen, in his keynote at the marketers’ ball, acknowledged that spam has been tainted by scams and fraud but stated: “[W]e cannot let the unsavory, dubiously employed bulk e-mail out there destroy the opportunities of targeted, sophisticated, responsibly used commercial e-mail, which, without doubt, holds promise as a powerful marketing tool … The DMA is endeavoring to do just that: preserve unsolicited commercial e-mail as a business communications tool, while also supporting the development of various permission marketing models.”
Wientzen’s only mention of opt-in marketing was to denounce it: “[W]e feel that most of those who push for an opt-in only regime have very little understanding of the incredibly negative impact it would have on the future use of e-mail as a marketing tool.”
Remarks like these are just untenable to the likes of Nicholas. “Thank you, Bob [Wientzen] and Jerry [Cerasale],” wrote Nicholas in his newsgroup posting. “Thank you for showing in a public and concrete way that even though you may dine on food finer than KFC and live in a neighborhood better than a trailer park, from a moral standpoint you’re really no different from the chickenboners we despise so much.”
Katherine Neville writes sweeping romantic historical novels that span the globe and centuries, chronicling the eternal conflict between good and evil. Interestingly, she is now involved in a similar struggle unfolding on a more prosaic playing field — the Web site of Amazon.com, where loyal Neville fans are battling a malicious critic who has been posting negative reviews of her latest thriller, “The Magic Circle.”
A rash of vicious — and suspiciously similar — critiques of “The Magic Circle” began appearing on Amazon.com soon after its paperback release in March 1999. And a handful of glowing reviews about another of her books have mysteriously disappeared from the Amazon site.
“BUYER BEWARE! THIS IS A TERRIBLE BOOK,” “TERRIBLE WRITING, TERRIBLE PLOT,” “A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME” are headers on these “Magic Circle”-slamming reviews — making quite a contrast from earlier negative reviews that criticized “The Magic Circle” for being ambitious but “disappointing,” “confusing,” or having a “weak ending.”
“At first I was absolutely horrified,” says Neville, who was alerted to the posts by concerned readers. “People have a right to hate any book,” she allowed, “but earlier bad reviews of ‘The Magic Circle’ had very specific complaints and the writers had personalities, while this appears to be a concerted attack by one person who says the same thing over and over. It’s a campaign to drive the book’s score down and to prevent other people from reading it.”
Many of the negative reviews have similar peculiarities — common spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. The word “unbelievable,” for instance, is misspelled in nearly a dozen of the reader reviews, and “worse” is mistakenly used instead of “worst” in several instances.
Neville says that the book — which has received mixed, but basically favorable, reviews from professional critics and readers alike — saw its Amazon rating slip from four stars (out of five) in March down to two stars shortly after the negative reviews began flooding in. Neville’s publisher, Ballantine Books, contacted Amazon.com last month. Amazon.com responded that the company has no way to verify or check against multiple review submissions and that readers have the right to “voice their opinions — even repeatedly!”
In that spirit, Neville’s passionate fans are rushing to her defense and posting gushing reviews to balance the negative impact of her critic. “The Magic Circle” (first published in hardcover in 1998) had accumulated 246 reader reviews as of Friday morning — boosting the rating to three stars; Neville’s 1988 international bestseller “The Eight” had racked up only 69 posts.
In early June, Vicki Kondelik, a librarian at the University of Michigan and host of the Unofficial Katherine Neville Home Page noticed that her 1997 review of “The Eight” had disappeared from Amazon.com, along with at least five other reviews. A computer printout of the reviews from late April confirms the disappearance.
Lizzie Allen, Amazon.com’s director of public relations, said she could not explain the mystery of the disappearing reviews. She said that submissions are deleted only when they don’t adhere to the review guidelines prohibiting “profanity, obscenities, or spiteful remarks.”
Neville expects her next step will be to speak with Amazon.com’s security and legal departments. “If it’s happened to me, it can happen to anyone,” she said. “I’d like to correct this across the board.”
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