he Direct Marketing Association, a trade group, plans to announce a plan today to prevent telemarketers from calling people on their cellphones.
A federal law passed in 1991 already bans most commercial calls to wireless phones, but as some mobile numbers have become hard to distinguish from landline numbers, marketers have found screening cellphones from their call lists difficult.
As a result, consumers have increasingly complained about answering their cellphones only to hear sales pitches, and marketers are worried about being fined or sued for inadvertently calling wireless numbers.
So the Direct Marketing Association, the trade group for direct mailers and telemarketers, has identified 280 million existing and prospective wireless numbers and will try to have marketers eliminate them from their lists.
The association, which has 4,700 member firms, says that the 1991 ban on auto-dialed or prerecorded telemarketing to cellphones makes it almost mandatory for marketers to participate. (Technically, manually dialed telemarketing calls to cellphones are still legal, but nearly all telemarketers rely on auto-dialers.)
"We want to eliminate cellphone calls now," said Robert Wientzen, the trade group's president and chief executive. "This will go a long way to doing that."
The list would cost marketers $500 a year, slightly more than the association charges for its list of consumers who want no marketing calls. That do-not-call registry has about 600 subscribers, many representing multiple marketers, and the association said it expected at least as many companies to sign up to use the cellular list.
One consumer, Pablo Nevares, of Tempe, Ariz., who frequently receives sales calls on his wireless phone, said the trade group's plan sounded like a good idea. "Maybe they'll stop calling here," he said.
But at least one hurdle lies ahead. In November 2003, a federal mandate to increase telephone competition will permit consumers to transfer landline numbers to wireless phones, an option described as "portability." Conceived by the Federal Communications Commission, the move will make cellular numbers indistinguishable from landline numbers — and, as things stand, impossible for telemarketers to avoid.
"We hope that between now and November 2003, there will be some creative ways to work this out," an F.C.C. spokeswoman said.
