France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

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.

Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway.

What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.

But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?

My pet peeve is that a full class A attestation is still not a requirement in 2026. The US FCC won't do it. I have no hope from the current administration. However, perhaps France is in a unique position to implement this. The idea is that all calls that have a domestic caller ID will be required to have full class A attestation and all carriers will be required by law to block any calls that do not have such full attestation. Any carrier that attests phone numbers that it is not supposed to should get huge fines and criminal charges. This is my dream for what all Telecoms in the world should do, hopefully beginning with France. This requires broad support within the country and a firm deadline so companies don't shrug it off until the last moment and then demand an extension.

Phones could be set to "allow incoming calls from contacts only" by default.

Then a spammer has to persuade you to add them to contacts before they spam you

In my personal experience basically all spam calls in France come from a fixed set of number prefixes. [0]

So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.

Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.

[0] https://lemagdelaconso.ouest-france.fr/dossier-2418-demarcha...

[1] https://communaute.orange.fr/t5/mon-telephone-par-internet-e...

Actually, people that installed the open-source Saracroche app don't really have this problem anymore.

Credits for this incredible independent app, available on third-party stores. Even better, the dev has added OpenStreetMap information about legit enterprises calling you.

https://saracroche.org

(of course its better to forbid them)

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.

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.

Related: https://saracroche.org/

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.

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

"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.

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.

Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.

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.

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

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

At least most of the Spanish one can be banned by blocklisting a whole company. which is what I did following a guide I found, and have reduced my Spam calls from 2 per day, to 3 per year.

However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.

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

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?

some of the third-party apps can show if a number is potentially a spam or a business. it's handy when your phone number is listed in the business directory to avoid those annoying calls.

Has anyone tried https://www.donotcall.gov/? curious, if folks have other lpts. These calls when they happen are relentless.

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.

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

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

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

I wonder how this will affect their economy and unemployment rate?

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...

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.

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