The Delaware Insurance Commissioner Matt Denn has barred Investors Union, LLC from doing “any business in Delaware without prior written approval of the Insurance Commissioner” and also had Investors Union pay $15,000 “to defray the cost of the investigation and prosecution of the case.”
The barred company sent postcards to Delaware residents “directing the recipients to call about ‘an annuity that has reached the end of its surrender period’ even though the firm that sent the card had no connection with any annuity a resident may have had.” Essentially the company was trying to filter callers to insurance agents who would attempt to sell them an annuity. Not only is it a convoluted way to make an annuity sale it’s also very deceptive.
Anytime you receive a postcard or other correspondence in the mail entreating you to call them about a financial product don’t pick up the phone. If you’re in the market for an annuity of other financial product I suggest you ask for referrals from friends or family members.
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent "Do not mail" is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing - and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today's [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today's merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer's right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel
Posted by: Ramsey Fahel | May 6, 2007 4:32 PM | Permalink to Comment