The FTC is going to start releasing data on consumer complaints for Telemarketing. This is great! The announcement is here at FTC Escalates the Fight against Illegal Robocalls Using Consumer Complaints to Aid Industry Call-Blocking Solutions.
Under a new initiative announced by the FTC, when consumers report Do Not Call or robocall violations to the agency, the robocaller phone numbers consumers provide will be released each day to telecommunications carriers and other industry partners that are implementing call-blocking solutions.
And the FTC is not just providing it to people in a secret club – anyone can see it! You can go to the Do Not Call (DNC) Reported Calls Data page and download the data yourself. Maybe you have an Asterisk or FreeSwitch PBX of your own, and you can feed this into a blacklist. Maybe you can route calls from these numbers into your own Lenny for fun and games.
If you are on a Linux system, you can create a cron job in /etc/cron.daily with this script to pull the results daily:
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#!/bin/bash DATE=`date --date="1 day ago" +"%Y-%m-%d"` wget https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/do-not-call-dnc-reported-calls-data/dnc_complaint_numbers_$DATE.csv -O /my/download/foler/dnc_complaint_numbers_$DATE.csv |
The script is pretty simple. Just run once daily and it will pull the data from the previous day. You can add code to the end of this to process the data after you download it. Note that the data file will not be provided on weekends or holidays, but the data for those days will be included in the file on the next business day.
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