Teleservices Direct, an Indianapolis-based telemarketing firm that has been soliciting Brandeis students daily since February, told Systems Service Manager for Informational Technology Services John Turner on Wednesday that they would stop calling in light of recent complaints.Turner made the request because of the large volume of student complaints forwarded to him, but ITS Chief Information Officer Perry Hanson said he does not know how long Teleservices will stick to the agreement.

"We are now monitoring their calls to campus so we'll know if they resume calling," Hanson said.

Teleservices Direct's database includes information on approximately eleven million college students, including their school and home contact information, according to the company's Web site.

The company did not return calls for comment by press time.

Turner said he created a database query that detects "top repeat callers," those who have dialed Brandeis the most number of times over a certain number of days. The query found that since February 5, two numbers called the University 13,000 times.

Because of several student complaints and the findings of the query, Turner said ITS was able to identify these two as Teleservices Direct phone numbers and is now looking into blocking calls from those numbers.

Sophia Yakir '07 received a brief call from Teleservices Monday, March 21, at about 9 a.m. She said a phone number with area code 317 appeared on her caller ID. The caller asked how her day was going, she responded that he had woken her, and then hung up. She did not report the call to ITS.

Director of Public Safety Edward Callahan said that after three students reported being solicited last week, he forwarded the complaints to ITS to investigate the issue and find a way to block the company's calls to campus.

Hanson said it is difficult and tedious to detect patterns, especially with Teleservices Direct frequently changing numbers.

"It's a guess," Hanson wrote in an e-mail to the Justice, commenting on the difficulty of detecting numbers. "But it'll allow us to be proactive."

Callahan said the University never divulges students' personal information and when students make calls on their room phones, only the University's main number appears on caller ID.

Hanson cautioned students against speaking with telemarketers.

"They're annoying [and] very obnoxious, but not necessarily illegal," he said.