[Erwin]

In Denmark, phone sales to consumers are generally illegal though strangely insurance and newspapers are excluded.

There's a national "do not call" list you can sign up to as well. This is amusing called the "Robinson List", presumably after Robinson Crusoe. The same concept is used in a dozen other countries.

I guess the penalties are severe enough that it generally only very shady people call, such as those pretending to be from Microsoft and calling to fix your computer.

[squeaky-clean]

It's also illegal in the USA, and we have our own national do not call list. The problem is the spammers are mostly using spoofed numbers (I get calls from my own phone number quite often) and are not actually physically located in the USA. It's difficult to prosecute some call-center warehouse located in Asia.

[StavrosK]

Rather off-topic, I was surprised by how readable this was to someone who doesn't speak a lick of Danish (me):

> Robinsonlisten er opkaldt efter Robinson Crusoe, som er en fiktiv person, der optræder i romanen Robinson Crusoe af Daniel Defoe. Han strander på en øde ø og lever isoleret.

[mnbvkhgvmj]

True but if a Danish person was to read this to you you would not even recognize the individual words...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

EDIT: Just FYI this is a clip from a Norwegian comedy program. Danish and Norwegian have very similar written languages but sound very different when spoken. In reality with some practice Danes, Swedes and Norwegians can speak together and understand one another.