We may not be ready to adopt “Live Telemarketer-Free or Die” as a state slogan but we might be getting close: New Hampshire is No. 1 when it comes to registering on the federal Do Not Call list.
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission says people in New Hampshire registered 93,339 numbers on the list per 100,000 residents, the highest ratio in the country.
You might think we’re an enthusiastic participant because we want to avoid unsolicited campaign calls before the presidential primary, but that’s not a factor. The Do Not Call list only concerns telemarketers, or sales calls from companies that have not dealt with your before. Campaigns are free to cold-call us, as are charities, surveys and debt collectors.
And, as the FTC’s explanation notes, the registry doesn’t actually block calls. It depends on voluntary compliance by companies: “The Registry can’t stop calls from scammers who ignore the Registry.”
New Hampshire wasn’t even in the top 10 of states where complaints were registered about calls evading the Do Not Call Registry: We are No. 11 on a per-capita basis.
As for registering with the New Hampshire’s leave-us-alone enthusiasm might just reflect a New England mentality: The second-highest state for per-capita Do Not Call registrations was Connecticut, third-highest was Massachusetts, fourth-highest was Maine and seventh-highest was Vermont, as reported by SafeHome.org.
The Do Not Call list started in 2003 and now contains 239 million actively registered numbers, according to data recently released by the FTC.
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