The authorities are raising their voices in the face of cold calling. A few days after a decision by Arcep aimed at limiting access for companies to telephone numbers beginning with 06 and 07, a new decree published last Friday in the Official Journal has once again put spokes in the wheels of companies specializing in the telephone canvassing. According to this decree, telephone sales canvassing will indeed be prohibited on weekends and public holidays, and its hours will be regulated from Monday to Friday, from March 1, 2023.
If “telephone canvassing of consumers is authorized from Monday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. It is, however, prohibited on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays”, specifies the decree.
And to emphasize that these provisions will apply both to people registered with the Bloctel regustre and to those “registered but requested under a current contract”. The only exception to the rule: if “the consumer has given his express and prior consent to be called, the professional must justify it”.
The end of an irritating phenomenon?
To avoid any abusive telephone canvassing, the decree published on Friday in the Official Journal indicates that a person may not be solicited “by telephone for commercial prospecting purposes more than four times a month by the same professional or by a person acting for its account”. Violation of these rules may be sanctioned with an administrative fine of 75,000 euros for a natural person and 375,000 euros for a legal person.
The authorities now seem determined to put an end to this most irritating phenomenon that constitutes abusive telephone canvassing. A few weeks ago, Arcep took a landmark decision by purely and simply depriving companies of the possibility of using telephone numbers starting with 06 and 07, which will be reserved for individuals only from January 1, 2023.
The telecoms policeman then justified this decision by his desire to “limit the nuisance suffered by end users receiving unsolicited calls or messages”, but also to avoid any “risk of shortage of 10-digit numbers”. According to figures provided by INSEE at the start of the year, 2% of cell phone owners say they never take a call, while 30% of them systematically filter their calls. On landlines, 17% of landline owners say they never pick up calls, while 26% of them only answer when they know the calling number.