While Barry Obama may have the audacity to hope, Cory Ruppersberger has the audacity to be stupid. A story in the baltimoresun.com details how young entrepreneurial Cory decided it was a good idea to call people on the National Do Not Call registry and solicit them for mortgages. 500,000 illegal calls since 2005, mostly through a call center in India. Did I mention that Cory’s pop is a Congressman from Maryland who voted for enforcing the DNC registry back in 2003? Now I certainly don’t indict the esteemed Congressman here. In fact, he was careful to properly distance himself from his son like any good politician would do. (”This is a business matter that my son Cory is working through with his attorney. I have no involvement in his company.”-he said in a prepared statement)

But let’s get down to brass tacks and ask some pertinent questions as an industry.

1)This guy didn’t have a proper license, yet was able to continue making these calls for 3 years unimpeded.

2) He sold leads to other companies, each with loan officers that most certainly dealt with irate prospects, yet went unreported by these sales people.

3) Calls were repeatedly made outside of time zone compliance laws, yet continued unabated by these sales teams.

4) A call center in India, relying on American business for their survival, was willing to make hundreds of thousands of calls, as they were being told by the people they were violating the DNC list, being told they were calling outside of the time restrictions, yet never complained to their American lead source, nor notifiying any authority, presumably.

If this were a case of 10,000 or even 50,000 calls in a 6 month period, I would argue that it was stopped once it seemed to bubble to the surface and that some or many watchdogs in the industry were protecting it. But 500,000 calls? Over 3 years? Multiple companies in multiple industries?

Here’s where it hurts– any consumer that reads that story…do you think they want to fill out an online form, take a phone call from a sales agent, or transact business in this manner ever again? We have to do better than this…