How to Stop Solicitors

Ever get to your door and hear the phone ringing, scramble to find your keys, drop all of your things, sprint down the hall and pick up the receiver, flushed and out of breath, only to hear "This is Tony, calling from your long-distance phone company with a special offer..."? Don't get mad, get expunged.

The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act restricts telemarketers from calling before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. Callers must identify themselves, the firm they represent, the purpose of the call, and provide you an address and phone number for their company. You can verbally ask telemarketers to put you on their "do not call list," which they are obligated to do without further effort on your part. If the firm subsequently calls more frequently than once a year, you can sue them under the TCPA and collect $500 (up to $1,500 if they willfully disregard your request to be left alone). You might eventually make some money, but there is an easier way.

For $20, Private Citizen, Inc. will add you to its directory of 4,000 fellow citizens who are sick of telemarketers. The Private Citizen Directory, sent to over 1,500 telemarketing firms across the country, threatens a $500 fee and, if necessary, a lawsuit to collect it, for each telephone solicitation its members receive. For most telemarketers the threat is enough to get you off their list. Even so, Private Citizen claims its members have collected over $1 million in the past five years from firms that failed to heed their demand to cease and desist. Contact Private Citizen at P.O. Box 233, Naperville, Ill. 60566, (630) 393-2370, http://privatecitizen.com.

If you get repeatedly called by stockbrokers, particularly those with a smooth New York rap working from a "boiler room," there is a simple way to get rid of them. Tell them you would love to chat, but are employed by a broker-dealer (such as Merrill Lynch). This tactic will quickly brush off even aggressive callers because by law, employees of brokerage firms must have their accounts where they work (so their employers can monitor potential insider trading), or receive written permission (rarely granted) to have them somewhere else. If brokers still keep pestering you, contact the Securities and Exchange Commission at (202) 942-7040.

If your mailbox sags under the weight of all those catalogs around Christmastime, there is a fix for that as well. For $10, Private Citizen will send your name to the largest junk mail and "list sales" firms in the country and say "Enough!" While Private Citizen will not get them all, your mailbox should be noticeably emptier within a couple of months. Be patient. Names that are sold tend to travel like a contagious virus from one list to the next. To do it yourself and save the ten bucks, write to the Mail Preference Service (MPS) of the Direct Marketing Association, P.O. Box 643, Carmel, NY 10512. The MPS maintains a master list of names of people who do not wish to be solicited by the mail. Once a quarter, an updated list is made available to members of the association, so it takes up to three months before you see a drop-off in junk mail.

Credit bureaus routinely sell your financial data to card issuers, a cozy little business arrangement at the root of those relentless offers for new credit cards, flight insurance, and other unnecessary financial services. You can stop the insanity with one phone call to the credit bureaus at (888) 5-OPTOUT.

Whether you use Private Citizen or write to the MPS, inevitably some junk mail will still get through. For these exceptions, write each company individually and ask for your name to be placed in the "suppress" file. If some mailers still don't get the message, you have one more arrow in your quiver. Go to your local post office and request Form 1500. This form was designed to stop illicit catalogs, but consumers have used it successfully to end all types of junk mail. Fill out the form, attach the objectionable piece of mail, and return it. By law, the offending party must stop sending you mail within 30 days. As for "saturation" mailings sent to every address in a given area and marked "RESIDENT," you are out of luck. The United States Postal Service will not stop such bulk mail. Install a large wastebasket next to your mailbox.

Your digital mailbox can fill up with garbage too. Junk e-mails, or "spam," can be reduced by using the e-Mail Preference Service of the DMA. Fill out the online form at www.e-mps.org-it's good for a year. Never respond to spam-it just encourages more. You can get rid of those annoying banner ads by going to www.doubleclick.com/optout. As for all those magazines jamming your snail-mailbox, if you didn't want them, why did you subscribe in the first place?