France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

amelius

And what about those marketing people who approach you on the streets? Can we make that illegal too? And the people going from door to door?

Raed667

The service that was managing this before (Bloctel) was just hacked https://frenchbreaches.com/alertes/bloctel-mshxaq0ysyd27ca7f...

xenator

Article is not clear. Does this law blocks B2B calls? If so then it can cause damage to the business.

ZeWaren

The previous system never blocked scams because scammers didn't bother to check if your phone number was in the block-list before calling you. That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.

amberjack

This seems so much of a no-brainer to me due to scammy calls to elderly and pure time loss responding to calls it is interesting not much has been done about it in other countries. I guess the telemarketers have a good lobby.

janci

In my experience, GDPR works wonders here. After saying I do not wish my personal information to be processed and revoke any consents a few times I do not receive these calls anymore.

Kon5ole

Great idea! Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage. A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution. A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number. Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.

ChrisRR

I suspect the data may be misleading. Unsolicited sales calls from genuine businesses are not the same as spam/scam calls

Cider9986

The problem is Phone numbers. No Band-Aids will fix them.

SpecialistK

Are calls originating in France a major source of these unsolicited calls? According to the article, a lot of the calls are coming from Morocco, outside of their jurisdiction. I'm in North America and most of the calls I get are using local numbers, often spoofed from (I suspect) South and South East Asia. Good luck enforcing Canadian or American law in literal slave camps on the China-Myanmar border.

thibaut_barrere

Related: https://saracroche.org/

ttoinou

In the last 2-3 years, my impression is that most french numbers receive daily unsolicited phone calls. In 2026 they even started sending scammy “missing delivery” text message with your real name printed on an attached MMS picture (on a parcel to deliver), making it even more real. Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France

ccakes

Automatic filtering on modern iOS has been a game changer here. Assume Android has something similar, but I can't speak highly enough of that one feature

dools

The only effective way to police this is to make the telco accountable and have a reporting system. Someone is terminating the calls and getting paid for doing it.

medlazik

Current law forces them to use known phone number ranges and to my surprise they respect it. I'm using an app that blocks those ranges, I receive about 3 unsolicited calls per day they're all blocked. We even have a phone provider that can block them for you. I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block

mytailorisrich

Another distraction, probably useless in practice, and in typical French government fashion they carved out a number of exceptions including to sell you subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, because...

suslik

"God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales". I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.

Highbrow

A welcoming move. I am from India and I use Truecaller premium to filter calls. It has become a big head-ache, making us to miss important calls

flyingshelf

Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop. Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally. You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.

mcv

That's great. Netherland banned them a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I still receive them. Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week from a major TV/internet provider (Ziggo-Vodafone; total crooks). I told them not to call me again, I complained to the regulator, but as far as I can tell, nothing was ever done about it. So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.