The scandalous plague of direct marketing telephone scam/spam

update: ok. i just called bezeq again and they have a possibility to mask your number for advertiser and automated calls. it takes about a week to be implemented. we'll see after if this still happening. i received again a call yesterday. i hung up but next time i will record the name of the advertiser and will start to list them. A new plague is coming to Israel and i am sure i am not the only one suffering from it. 

For the past 2 months every day or close to, i receive at home, my personal phone number, automated calls for advertising.

Those are run by phone robots who play pre recorded advertising messages.

I have no idea how they got my number. And there is absolutely no way to know how they did it, nor to ask an opt out.

I called Bezeq, the land line phone company in Israel to ask them to block those calls. They claim they have no idea what those calls are. They can't block them since they don't know the origin. 

Let's put this aside for a sec. Because this is a totally crap excuse. If bezeq wanted to block those calls they could do it. They could originate the caller and block them on request.

Now the real problem is that there are out there companies that spam your home phone number with unsolicited calls. In countries where i lived before there are laws to prevent that and punish those who bypass the rules.

Who in Israel is going to address that? Is there a direct marketing association in Israel? Is this someone at the telco minister?

I have no idea. I want this to change because it pollutes my life (calls are coming in the evening when i don't want to be disturbed)

We need a law to

• prevent abusive collection of private number
• enable simple opt out from your operator
• track the callers and punish them
• force the advertiser to disclose how they got your number

Until this happens, Israel will remain an area of scam for israeli citizens taken hostage by stupid advertisers.