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welcome everyone and thanks for tuning in for another episode of level up law we're here at south carolina legal services we're leveling up your legal knowledge on the different areas of law that we practice in i'm susan engel senior staff attorney with south carolina legal services and i'll be the host of the webinar today along with our producer kenneth elliott from our i.t department here at legal services we are joined today by scl's attorney bronte inelli from our office in conway south carolina bronte will be discussing how to deal with those dreaded robocalls and telemarketers so this should prove to be a very interesting episode of level of law now remember this is not any legal advice but just general information for the public always consult with an attorney for any of those specific legal issues that you have personally at the end of today's presentation we will be providing some information about how to apply for our free legal assistance here at legal services and also how to access our public information and other resources that we have for you as always we will post a recording of this webcast on our youtube channel later this week and that will also have the slides that brought you will be using today now even though you'll be in listen only mode be sure to take advantage of the opportunity and put any questions you have in the question box as time allows bronte will provide some general information to answer your questions again thanks everyone so much for joining us today and bronte you can go ahead and take it away right thank you susie for that wonderful introduction as susie has stated my name is bronte annelli and i am an attorney here with south carolina legal services and i'm really excited today to be teaching you about robocalling exactly what are your rights this is something that more people seem to be experiencing on a daily basis also i've experienced my entire life and did not know that i could actually do things to stop it so my purpose of today's presentation is to actually give you tools that you can use yourself not only just informing you about the law so before we begin i do have a poll for you um yes i do have a poll for you so oh um how many calls do you get from telemarketers per week i will tell you myself i get about 10 plus and i know when i first got my number i had way too many that i actually thought about changing my number at one point in time okay if everybody can go ahead and select one of the options and we will close the poll in about 15 seconds okay it looks like uh most people uh 67 are in that three to ten category and the other 33 percent get one to three calls per week perfect well one thing we will teach you today is how to make those numbers go down significantly um so before we begin we need to answer ourselves what is robocalling robocall is a phone call using a computerized auto dialed system to deliver a pre-recorded message it's typically for political and telephone uh telephone marketing campaigns um i know during the election i got a ton of political phone calls and that is an example of telemarketing another example is a number from utah calling you in boston today's course is only focusing on what you can do to protect yourself from these annoying calls that you receive that are computerized automated pre-recording messages so although you may receive a lot of other phone calls from other organizations from actual persons this one is really for those pre-recorded messages that you get from all over the country so first i'm going to teach you what are your rights well you are actually protected under an act from the federal government uh there is a federal act in place that actually helps protect you the law was enacted by congress and anybody doing business in the u.s should be following this law or anybody calling a person in the u.s even if they're out of out of the united states should be following this law this is called the telephone communication protections act or the tcpa i'm going to be using the tcpa all throughout this call just because it really helps shorten it also that way you become familiar with the acronyms it protects you against a variety of different things pertaining to your phone call and as i stated before we are focusing only on the pre-recorded messages it limits unsolicited pre-recorded tele telemarketing calls made by your landline home zone and it also prohibits all auto dialed or pre-recorded calls or text messages to your cell phone guests or patients at rooms and healthcare facilities or elderly homes or any telephone line where you are charged for your call because it limits that to where you are charged for your call it is it includes all cell phones so what this means is that on your home phone there are certain things that can and cannot be done but again your cell phone limits everything but of course as always there are exceptions so the tcpa prohibits initiating any marketing calls to a residential telephone line using an artificial or pre-recorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of you the called party except in a case where it is an emergency a debt collection call owed or a debt owed by the federal government telemarketing calls to home lines can be made using an automated telephone dialing system or the atds we'll be talking a little bit about that later and that can be done without your prior consent but it seems then that there are limitations that will be placed on telemarketing well the question then is what is that well wikipedia says that telemarketing is trying to get people to buy products or services through the phone however the federal government has expanded that a little bit and under the federal definition it includes that messages sent for the purposes of encouraging the purchase or rental of or investment in properties goods or services as you can see between the two definitions the federal definition really does expand it a little bit more compared to wikipedia so it is always important that when you are trying to figure out what you can and cannot do at home you look at the law not wikipedia but automated messages that are not telemarketing are calls made for emergencies like flood warnings containing information like balances from your bank fraud for your credit cards school closings or calls made to and on behalf of non-profits and any health care messages on behalf of them that's each facility so i know one thing that is very popular that a lot of people are doing is when they go see a doctor they check off the box that the doctor can leave a voicemail talking about what is wrong with them as well as their results from the labs and that in itself is not telemarketing as well as emergency calls about flood warnings school closures or your bank contacting you for this fraud those are all examples of what telemarketing is not it is specifically for the encouraging of purchasing renting investment of any property goods or services that you may have now remember that under the tca pa you are protected for pre-recorded calls to your home an auto-dialed or pre-recorded messages to your cell phone for these purposes but what happens when the company calling you with the pre-recorded messages are using the automated telephone dialing system or the atds well as i've already talked about a little bit before atds stands for the automatic telephone dialing system these are systems that we think about where a computer will randomly just start calling you and this computer has a phone number located in utah but you're here in boston or here in south carolina i should say and every single week they just call you call you call you call you and then all of a sudden you start getting another number about a week or two later just constantly calling calling calling you these are the automated telephone dialing systems it if you pick it up it typically plays a pre-recorded message often we ignore it um and once you click ignore or you hang up the phone it just automatically calls another one the best way to think of it is it's a computer system that just sits there and dials everything for you believe it or not you are actually protected under these automatic telephone dialing systems so these computers and the people that run these computers under the tcpa it is illegal for anyone in the us or someone outside of the u.s calling you to make a call using this system or an artificial or pre-recorded message to any number assigned to a cellular service or any number where you are charged for the call but that does not protect your home phone you may be saying to yourself well doesn't that mean that all calls that use this system to my cell phone is illegal well no unfortunately not just like everything the government has made exceptions to the rules and there are two particular exceptions emergencies and calls where they have received your prior express consent emergencies are ones that i've already mentioned so flood warnings snowstorms tornado warnings school closings they are all permitted to call you with this automatic dialing system and it's just for convenience purposes that way you don't have one person trying to reach 100 people dialing on their own this is a system that will allow them and allow the emergency information to get out very quickly which is exactly what we need but they can also use this system if you have their if you gave them prior written consent or prior express consent i should say well you might be thinking to yourself i have never signed up to be given all of my phone numbers to all of these people in order to have my phone uh be called as many times as it is so at this time i do have another poll question for you um i'm going to ask you how many applications have you filled out for services and services includes signing up for credit cards subscriptions um applying to things like loans holidays any type of service that you may have received i will tell you i think at this point i think i might have done it over 20 times just between school and my subscriptions about 20 plus applications sounds about right for me all right it looks like most people have done over 20. see you guys and i we're all on the same boat here together well it is interesting because your application actually has that prior written consent so first and foremost the law itself is not defined for prior written consent it is an order and has been expanded through case law so under the order the tcpa helps us define it as any telephone subscriber who releases their number has an effect given prior written consent to be called by the company to which they release their number a court case has expanded it even further and says that not only have you given the company that you gave your number to but also any agency calling on there the house so what this means is that every time you fill out an application or subscribe to anything you have not only given that company or person permission to call you but you have given anybody calling on their behalf permission to call you so to put this in an example you won the lottery and the first thing you do is decide to sign up for a cruise so you book the cruise everything's going and on some cruises when they go to a different island or a different port they have these adventures that you could sign up with third-party companies um located in the area if you go to the caribbean it's typically snorkeling biking fishing kayaking zip lining things like that so when you sign up for this holiday you have given of course the cruise ship the authority to contact you relating to the but you also have given permission for all of those agencies to contact you to see if you're willing to sign up for their products and their services while you're on your cruise so even though you did not give those smaller companies permission to call you because you gave that bigger company permission to call you and these smaller companies are contacting you because you're part of the big company and in this example it's the cruise ship um you have actually given your number out instead of to one person to 10 15 people and they can all contact you so this is how you can have one application lead to hundreds of phone calls in a month and possibly a year but the good news is is that you can actually revoke your consent there are a couple of ways you can do that so revoking consent is what you can do on your own and the tcpa allows you to revoke it using any reasonable methods and what reasonable methods that the act is telling you to do just tell them answer the call say stop calling me hang up the phone if any way that you can clearly tell that organization that you do not want to be called anymore that is a reasonable method under the law you can also choose to write a letter and send it to the company themselves once you have revoked your consent then they are not supposed to contact you anymore so any which way you can clearly do it you're able to do it for however you cannot revoke consent in agreements that you entered into with a company that they told you about um and let me explain that a little bit clearly um i don't think i did a good enough job so any person who agreed to be contacted as part of a bargain for exchange really fancy way of saying part of a contract uh cannot unilaterally revoke if it's part of that contract so you might be thinking well i don't i don't call up my cruise ship company and negotiate what type of betting i want where i want how the price or any of that i don't do that so what do you mean by contract well the terms and condition box that you click every single time you sign up for something online is part of that contract so you cannot revoke your consent if it says in those terms and conditions that you cannot revoke your consent without their permission all right so for example um i do have a poll here um and this is just to help you with hypotheticals so sam signs up for account for amazon sam gives his telephone number in the application and hits submit then send it to us a delivery service from amazon keeps contacting sam trying to get him to sign up for quick shipping can sam revoke his consent from send it to us and just so you know send it to us is not an actual delivery service i made it up but i thought it was very clever so it makes me happy and i think it should be a delivery service very clever for sure okay it looks like we have got a 50 50 split on that so um yeah and no for 50 so what's that what's the right answer rocky the right answer is yes of course as always with this hypothetical as it is written the answer is yes he can revoke he cannot revoke if in the terms and conditions it says he cannot but when it comes to the hypothetical as it is written he can revoke all he has to do is tell send it to us to stop calling him all right i do have another hypothetical here john signs up for a federally backed mortgage as he fills out the application he gives them his number and clicks the terms and conditions box saying he agrees john does not read the terms and conditions just like any other person but in the terms it allows john to be contacted by his phone number and as part of the contract he cannot revoke it on his own john is now receiving calls from private mortgage companies on behalf of the federally backed mortgage company can john revoke this consent on his own okay and the answer is a hundred percent of our audience said no he cannot revoke this on his own exactly um so in this situation um you guys are absolutely correct he cannot revoke it on his own which is why it is important to read the term and conditions but i found out in law school that if you spent your entire life reading every term and conditions you spent an average of 18 years of your life reading contracts so the purpose of today's meeting is how do you stop this there are three ways that you can actually stop this from happening and to really limit those amount of calls you can do it on your own you can contact agencies and you could actually go through court action so my main focus is really going to be on what you can do on your own to stop this all right so if you have pen and papers this is a good time to bring them out so the first you can thing you can do is actually answ r your phone i know it sounds weird i know it goes against everything that people taught us i know my mom told me never answer a number you do not know but answering the phone is your first step to stopping this so by answering the phone you can do a couple of things first you can collect the information and you can also revoke consent when you collect their information you need to find out who is calling you what their number is where their location is sometimes automated messages will have options for you if they're they're asking you to verify information do not i repeat do not give them any of your information do not verify anything do not admit that you are so and so with that social security number living at that address because if it is a scam they now have your correct contact information but also you have not collected their information the purpose of collecting their information is that you can do some research to figure out if this is a scam or if this is a proper agency and that really is to protect you so knowing if people have your information out there is step one to knowing if you are fully protected on your own now again as i stated for verification it'll just ask you to press one or two do not do it um if it is a person on the line again do not answer any of their questions if they say they cannot give you any of their information of who they are where they are their address their website until you verify your information that's a lie they should be giving you all of their contact information if you ask for it and you are not required to verify any of your information online collecting information is important because as i stated you will know if a call is a scam or if it's not um and it's also a way for you to revoke consent by simply answering the phone so once you collect this information immediately tell them do not call me and hang up the phone the second thing you can do besides revoking consent through the phone number is also using that information that you have collected to send them a letter so if it is an automated voice message and they didn't have that option for you to say stop calling me you can type up a letter saying stop calling me send it to the information that you received and then that should prevent the calls from going forward the next thing you can do is keep track of your numbers this is very important um because every single time they contact you they being the company or person that they contact you after you have revoked consent is a violation of the law it is also important to keep track of numbers because if it is an automated telephone dialing system um that is illegal in a lot of cases and i know a couple of agencies um like the consumer consumer affairs bureau will actually are actually actively working to stop these numbers from being used again so things that you can do is just simply write them down kind of keep a list of them and again you can report them both to the fcc as well as the commission itself and then you can complain to agencies so a couple of things that you can do at agencies here the first thing you can do is actually put your name on the national do not call registry this is a list that all companies have access to nationwide and if your name's on that list and they still continue to call you without your express consent well then what they're doing is illegal and that's a way to just blanket all of your revocations of your express consent the next thing you can do is actually contact the consumer affairs commission you can present them with all of the numbers that you receive so they can keep track of that this is a they do have a task force as i stated before to set up to help get a turn um robo calls and to do this they actually do need the numbers so if you do have that information send it over to them they are actively working to prevent it then finally you can actually complain to the state attorney general many states actually have huge class action lawsuits um going against the various companies who are participating in robocalling and violating the tcpa and that information is actually at the state attorney general's office so by complaining to the state attorney general you are making sure that they are aware that this issue is occurring in the state and if they have enough uh people complaining about it well then they might be able to do something legally on your behalf for that um which is a great transition into the third thing that can do that you can occur in part of me the third thing that can assist you in preventing these robocalls and that is through court assistance so if you can if you can afford to you can also try to get a private attorney to stop you or to help you stop these calls by filing a private action a private court case is a court case not brought by a government employee so this would not be brought by the state but by a private attorney um to prove this case you must prove the following that there was a violation of the act that a company willfully or knowingly violated it and if they have satisfied the first two well then the court may award up to three times the amount available and this is actually for the cost that you experienced be it every single time they called you and you lost the dollar fifty or fifty cents whatever it may be or up to five hundred dollars for each violation and typically whichever one is larger at that point now things you should be aware of um that in preparing for a court case it's very important especially for a private action that you keep track of when you revoked what company you revoked to how you revoked um if you wrote them a letter or copy of that letter all the numbers that um called you after you revoked for that company because every single time that you pardon me every single time that they have contacted you after you expressly revoked your consent is a violation is a willful and knowing violation and for every single call it's five hundred dollars because every call is a violation itself now willful and knowing that doesn't mean a mistake so for example somebody else accidentally put your number on their application or put or the company accidentally put your number in when they were setting up the auto dial that mistakes themselves are not willful or knowing um so they do not count but if a company is knowingly doing so you revoke your consent and still is calling you then that is where court assistance can come in so really when it comes down to what type of assistance can be helpful it's really what you can do on your own um it really starts with you which is very different for what a lot of different areas of law are about there are many things you can do on your own front to stop these calls now there are things that you need to watch out for and make sure that you do not do so the first one is unknown or block numbers just don't do not answer them if you do not if the call screen says unknown or if the number is blocked just do not answer them ignore them um we're talking about those numbers where it pops up and it looks like a number that could belong to your sister or your brother um those are the numbers we're talking about we're not talking about numbers that come up blocked on your phone make sure they remain blocked because those numbers are more likely to be spam and actually trying to create fraud and we don't want you to experience that also right now many people are receiving calls from debt collectors first it's always good to assume that debt collectors have your consent this is this presentation was not for debt collectors uh the reason being is that there are a lot of different other laws and exceptions that do apply for debt collectors but you can still attempt to revoke your consent because some debt collectors do not have that level of consent um and to do so you would just answer the phone call like you would they would identify themselves that they're trying to collect debt once again do not verify any of your information just ask them not to call you and to only be contacted through written communications they should have your contact information if they're a legitimate company so just ask that it be sent to the address that they have on file and if they are legitimate they will send you communications only through written communications at that point if they're not legitimate they're going to keep trying to call you so i do recommend that you keep track of their numbers as well and you do contact an attorney to assist you even further after you have revoked again so with that being stated i do have a couple of other questions uh so this poll um is just the beginning of many different hypotheticals so first you receive a call from a number you do not recognize do you ignore it or answer it that's a good question definitely and i will add that this is not an unknown number or a block number this is just a number that's random calling you okay it looks like everyone has invaded and we have 75 say answer and 25 say ignore the call great i love the enthusiasm so i would personally say answer it that is the first way that you begin stopping all of these random numbers calling you i would recommend only ignoring it if it is a blocked or unknown number but in this hypothetical since it is just a number you do not recognize and i did not specify even further i would recommend you answer it so you answer the call and you hear that it's an automated message identifying the company and asking for a verification do you a verify the information b write your their name and their number down and then hang up the phone or it depends all right i think we can close the poll now and we've got another 50 50 split bronte so they write down the name and number and then hang up and 50 say it depends well in this situation it does depend um and the reason why i say it does depend is because if a bank is calling you and it's your bank saying hey there's some fraudulent activity on your credit card we we just want to make sure that this information is correct um and you will know it so for example a personal example the other day i got a phone call from a number i didn't recognize i ignored it just because i was busy at the time and they left a voicemail saying hey this is your bank give us a call back we're trying to verify some information so i gave them a call and they said oh thank you for giving us a call back we're just making sure this information is correct and they verified my five most recent transactions the reason being is because i ended up buying something that i normally wouldn't buy for something like that it is very good to verify your information the bank will identify itself um it'll make sure that um they're telling you the information not so much of hey tell me your social security number tell me all that information it's more of you just saying yes or no to the information that they have on file um so in that situation it's good to verify now if you answer the phone and it's nobody you recognize it's not your bank asking for verification or for your health services write the name and number down and then hang up the phone so that was a trick question um so do not worry if you feel bad or anything y'all are doing great so the next hypothetical so in this situation you write the name number down of the company you hang up the phone you research the company and find their address the company continues to call you what should you do a write a letter revoking the consent b answer and tell them to stop calling you c keep track of all the numbers they call you from and the amount of times they call you and d all of the above so again in this hypothetical you do not know who the company is you wrote their name and number down and then hung up the phone well it looks like everybody's learning a lot today the 100 of people said all of the above it y'all are right here so exactly you will do everything the more that you can do to be clear the better um now i am going to take this time to mention something that i did forget previously if you pick up the phone and are very clear to say stop calling me but then the company says well to revoke consent you have to go through steps a through d no you do not all you have to do is tell them to stop calling i typically recommend also writing a letter that way it's very clear that you have revoked consent um and there is no doubts about it that you did so that's always my preference is to cover yourself by doing it two ways instead of just one and then again keeping track of that numbers to really help yourself the any agency that you contacted or if you choose to go to the attorney general or to a private attorney that will definitely help them out finally my last polling question what is the first thing you should do after this call are you going to eat lunch sign up for the national do not call registry or a and b because you're both hungry and you also want to protect yourself all right we got 50 50. there's only 50 percent of the people out there that are hungry 50 said sign up for the national do not call registry and 50 said both a and b i am hungry and i want to protect myself that's awesome so i am also hungry and i want to protect myself so i'm going to be doing both but whatever your preferences that's uh there was no way to get that question wrong um all right so at this point in time i am going to um answer any questions that you may have the information on the screen is our contact information here for south carolina legal services as i stated before um or pardon me as soon as you stated before you should contact an attorney for specific assistance this was just to tell you what you can do on your own to stop those pesky robocalls so with that being stated if there are any questions i do not mind answering or if susie has any answers herself um i will be here well thanks so much bronte i do want to um bring in our producer kenneth because the the slide that i'm seeing right now is one of the poll questions still so we may not have officially closed one of our polls so producer kenneth if you can figure that out for me that'd be great so we can show everyone our contact information because if if you're not able to afford a lawyer and you need one for this or any other type of topic that we handle here at south carolina legal services then [Music] we do want you to have that information okay now bronte i'm just seeing you on the screen and there's the slide great so everybody can get that information you know we have a lot of resources at south carolina legal services and we've gotten a lot of compliments on how many resources we do have both on our websites sc.legal.org and lawhelp.org sc as well as all of our social media and all of these great level of law episodes that we have on our youtube channel it looks like right now we don't have any questions that was a very thorough presentation and since you invited me to say something bronte i do want to say i thought you made a great point about reading the terms and conditions you know sadly i think most people don't take the time to read the terms and conditions when they click that box and that can definitely be unfortunate because you know quite often people say well gee i had no idea that this would happen and you know you have to say well had you read the terms and conditions that you clicked that you agreed to you probably would have seen that so sometimes that's a helpful reason or excuse but most times it's not so if you can read the terms and conditions that's always a great thing but i think human nature unfortunately uh is to not read them and i thought you made a great point about the consent to these calls is going to be varied in those terms and conditions so most likely you did agree to it well i want to take this moment while we're showing our information on the screen to thank you bronte and nelly for an excellent presentation on robocalls this is one of those things that we all need to know more about because it is such a prevalent thing in our society right now and thanks to all of you in the audience who joined us today we really do appreciate your interest in this subject matter and the others that we bring to you here each week on level up law every tuesday at noon we ducate the public on some of these most common legal issues that we see here at south carolina legal services so please be sure and let folks know about our level up law series you can just go to our youtube 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level up law episode that gives you some really great helpful hints about how to do that walks you right through the whole process just remember also an easy way to see what's coming up each week on level up law is to follow us on our facebook page where we post everything you can also follow us on twitter and instagram you can see those links right here on the slide and you'll get this notification and lots of other good information that our it department and social media folks are always sharing with the public well thanks for tuning in to level up law today everybody thanks again to bronte and nelly from our conway office and everyone in the audience we look forward to having you back with us next week when we will be talking about guardianships and conservatorships in probate court all right everybody that concludes today's webinar thanks for tuning in you