MarketStar Corporation: The Business-to-Consumer Call Center That Ignored Do Not Call Registry Registrations at Scale

MarketStar Corporation, a large business-to-consumer telemarketing services company that conducts outbound calling campaigns on behalf of major consumer brands, agreed to pay a multi-million-dollar civil penalty to resolve findings that it placed millions of telemarketing calls to phone numbers registered on the National Do Not Call Registry — a systematic pattern of noncompliance that generated a sustained volume of consumer complaints and that regulators found reflected inadequate compliance infrastructure rather than isolated calling errors.DOCUMENTED

The National Do Not Call Registry was established specifically to give consumers a mechanism for stopping unsolicited telemarketing calls to their residential and wireless phone numbers. Registry registrants have clearly expressed a preference not to receive commercial telemarketing calls, and the Telemarketing Sales Rule requires telemarketers to access the Registry frequently and scrub their calling lists against Registry records before placing calls. When a telemarketer calls a Registry-registered number without an established business relationship or express prior written consent, it is violating both the consumer's stated preference and federal law.REVIEWED

How DNCR Compliance Is Supposed to Work

The Telemarketing Sales Rule requires that telemarketers accessing the National Do Not Call Registry to scrub their calling lists do so at least every 31 days — meaning that calling lists must be compared against the current Registry database within the past month before any outbound calls are placed. Telemarketers must also maintain internal do-not-call lists of individuals who have requested not to be called by that specific company, and must honor those internal list requests even if the consumer is not on the Registry. The combination of Registry scrubbing and internal list maintenance is supposed to ensure that virtually no consumer who has expressed a preference not to receive calls actually receives them.REVIEWED

MarketStar's compliance failures were found across multiple aspects of this framework. Some calling lists were not scrubbed at the required 31-day frequency, meaning they could include numbers that had been added to the Registry after the last scrub but before the calling campaign concluded. Some lists received from client brands were not scrubbed at all before outbound calling began — relying on the client's representation that their list was clean rather than independently verifying compliance. And the company's monitoring of internal do-not-call requests did not consistently prevent subsequent calls to numbers that had requested no further contact.DOCUMENTED

Liability Across the Campaign Structure

MarketStar operates as a third-party telemarketing services provider — it makes calls on behalf of client brands whose products and services it is promoting. The Telemarketing Sales Rule imposes liability on both the seller — the brand whose product is being sold — and the telemarketer — the company making the calls — for violations that occur in a campaign. MarketStar's liability in this enforcement action relates to its own calling operations; client brands whose campaigns generated violations may face separate regulatory exposure for the calls made on their behalf.DOCUMENTED

The structure of outsourced telemarketing creates compliance risk for brands that rely on third-party call centers without adequate oversight of the compliance practices those centers apply. Brands that outsource telemarketing should conduct periodic audits of their telemarketing vendors' Registry scrubbing practices, should contractually require compliance and should verify it rather than relying on the vendor's representation, and should implement monitoring that would identify abnormal complaint volumes that might signal compliance failures before they accumulate to the scale that triggers a regulatory action.REVIEWED

Millions of Registry-registered numbers were called by MarketStar campaigns over the violation period — a volume inconsistent with isolated calling errors and consistent with systematic scrubbing failures across the company's campaign management operations.

Consumer Options for Persistent Unwanted Calls

Consumers who continue receiving unwanted telemarketing calls after registering on the Do Not Call Registry have several options. Filing a complaint at donotcall.gov provides regulators with data on which companies are generating complaint volumes, which informs enforcement prioritization. Consumers can also request that specific companies add their number to the company's internal do-not-call list — a request the company is legally required to honor regardless of Registry registration status. For calls from spoofed or unknown numbers, call-blocking apps and wireless carrier call-screening services can reduce the volume of unwanted calls that get through. Consumers who believe they have been called in violation of the Registry can also file complaints with their state attorney general, whose consumer protection division may have additional enforcement tools for repeat Registry violators.DOCUMENTED

Managing Unwanted Telemarketing Calls

Consumers who are registered on the National Do Not Call Registry and continue to receive telemarketing calls have several options beyond simply filing a complaint. For calls from businesses where you have an established business relationship — defined as a company from which you have purchased goods or services within the past 18 months — the DNCR does not apply until you have specifically told that company not to call you. Telling the caller to place your number on their company-specific do-not-call list should stop further calls from that company regardless of your DNCR status. For robocalls and calls from companies with whom you have no relationship, modern wireless carriers offer free or low-cost call-filtering services that can screen unknown callers and block known spam numbers before your phone rings. Apps including Nomorobo, Hiya, and Truecaller use community-sourced databases of known spam and telemarketing numbers to provide real-time screening. For calls you believe violate the DNCR, the donotcall.gov complaint process takes approximately two minutes and the complaints you file contribute to enforcement data that regulators use to prioritize actions against high-volume violators like MarketStar.

Have documents relevant to this story? Reach us through our tips channel.