Interested in a competition? Or: Aren’t you underinsured? And isn’t your current electricity contract far too expensive? Such advertising calls are annoying – and lead to more and more complaints.
According to statistics, advertising calls have never caused as much trouble in Germany as they did last year. The Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) received 79,702 complaints about unauthorized telephone advertising, a quarter (26 percent) more than in the previous year, according to the Bonn authority.
The previous high of 63,273 complaints was recorded in 2020. The unwanted advertising calls were about insurance, financial products and energy contracts. Advertising for sweepstakes and magazine subscriptions also annoyed consumers.
Higher fines for solicitation calls
Telephone advertising is only allowed if consumers have given their prior consent. The caller must transmit the number. The Federal Network Agency investigates the complaints and imposes fines if necessary. Last year, companies were awarded a total of 1.435 million euros, which was 84,000 euros more than in 2020.
In future, the authorities will be able to ask advertising companies to pay even more than before, since the fine in December 2021 in the case of suppressed phone numbers increased from a maximum of EUR 10,000 to EUR 300,000. Calls without a number on the display were particularly common last year – the threat of fines is now being used to counteract this. It was also noticeable that some advertisers used different phone numbers.
Authorities chief Jochen Homann said that the perpetrators would be pursued again this year “with all the means available to us”. “We continue to take vigorous action against the companies that operate unauthorized telephone advertising.” Advertising calls with a suppressed number are “unacceptable”.
Also read: Use a trick to find the owner of an unknown cell phone number
Numbers of complaints merely indicate a problem
In the past year, the authority had registered significantly more complaints. Before that, however, there had been a decline in critical statements – so the trend is not very clear.
In any case, the number of complaints is only an indication of problems. Because it is possible that the increase is at least partly due to the fact that the possibility of complaining to the Federal Network Agency has become better known. Many consumers were probably already annoyed by the advertising calls, but only now are they reporting to the Bonn authorities.
Politicians want to fight advertising calls
Politicians are concerned about the number of complaints. The FDP member of parliament Reinhard Houben pointed out that the illegal advertising calls were often made to landline numbers that are in the telephone book. “It’s a big problem for older people who still use their landline phones a lot.”
He appealed to the network agency to act with all severity against the companies. The options provided for by the tightened law “should also lead to significantly higher fines this year if the intrusive advertising companies simply continue as before”. The unauthorized phone calls are “a major annoyance, the cause of which must be consistently combated”.
Also complaints about fax and SMS
The Federal Network Agency had also registered an increasing number of complaints about another type of unwanted contact.
Last year, for example, this involved fax advertising for corona tests and masks as well as fraudulent SMS with the “smishing” scam. With the latter, the aim is to trick consumers into clicking on a link and then unknowingly downloading malware. The Federal Network Agency reacted and, among other things, had 1110 numbers switched off because of abuse.
These spam phone numbers are currently causing trouble
People who are affected by telephone terror through unwanted advertising calls can not only report the corresponding numbers, they also have the opportunity to protect themselves. TECHBOOK publishes every month the list of phone numbers that cause trouble particularly often. You should therefore beware of such calls. Or you can block the phone numbers in your router. This is very easy to do with the Fritzbox, for example. If, despite everything, you have accepted a spam call, you should definitely avoid saying a certain word on the phone.