Current Australian Issues - Essay Example

Telemarketing Abuse Telemarketing has been a long and unresolved issue of Australia. Abuse of the telephone system by telemarketers, giving calls to locals on a daily basis has become the norm. Locals have reported disturbance and nuisance arising from these never-ending calls. The telemarketing scam calls are a hoax and they try to convince people to be troubleshooters and offer technical support. A Typical PC scam call will question people about their PC performance and will inform them of a malware detected due to browsing virus-infected websites which causes malicious content to be downloaded onto the PC.

They try to persuade the computer novices, who barely have any idea of their computer system and are alarmed by such calls and due to their limited knowledge are inclined towards believing on such scams. The technician asks the consumer to log on to a third party website for the purpose of remote access troubleshooting to the consumer’s PC. The telemarketers go to such extents that they claim they belong to reputed computer organizations such as “Microsoft” and “Windows”. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) are looking forward into investigating towards this matter and warning the consumers to remain attentive about such scams (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).

The calls come at all odd times of the day, due to the fact that the telemarketers are not from Australia. A new trend in the type of PC-related scam calls have been observed, in which the caller falsely claims to belong to some foreign government, or from the consumer’s bank and they try to convince the consumers to recover their money that they have lost in previous scams, in return for a moderate fee. This is again a fraud and the consumer ends up paying more money, without any retrieval.

PC scam calls are just one genre of the telemarketing abuse. Retrieving consumer’s personal identification details also helps these scammers to provide language-specific calls. The consumer is dealt with the telemarketer of the same foreign language, in the hope of optimized persuasion strategies. Lately consumers have complained of calls by telemarketers for enrolling their kids in tuition centers for specific subjects. Another genre of scam calls relate to the religious preferences of the consumers.

Consumers have been asked to join religious centers that preach certain beliefs. The idea behind these telemarketers is to scrape out as much money as they can from the consumers, by stealing their identification details, in order to relate to the consumers on a more personal level. The calls are consistent. Even after multiple hang ups, their recurrence in the consumer’s lives is a point of major concern. Many more scams are yet to be reported but their rise since the past 2 years have alarmed the ACCC as well as the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

The ACMA have partnered with international regulators to tackle this problem. The ACMA has dedicated significant resources to identify these reprobate telemarketers. They are working in parallel with other government agencies to warn their consumers and take strict action. Works CitedAustralian Competition and Consumer Commission. “Welcome to the ACCC”. Acc.gov.au. n.d. Web. 3rd December 2012.