According to reports, the local medical emergency center in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province, received more than 1,600 calls from realty sales representatives from April to May, which poses a risk to those who need help in emergencies. Thepaper.cn comments:

Medical emergency hotlines are of utmost importance to society. To those in emergencies, it may be a matter of life and death. Those who called the medical emergency center so frequently are suspected of threatening public security. They have broken the law, and the local police and judiciary have to perform their duty in such instances.

After the emergency center called the police, the four realty companies that had acquired lists of local telephone numbers and kept calling the emergency center were told by the local telecom authorities to cease further calls, and they received other punishments such as the suspension of official registration of apartments under their names.

Are these penalties enough?

Even sales calls randomly targeting ordinary residents are illegal. As early as 2012, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the nation's top legislature, passed a decision that clearly prohibits the sending of commercial electronic messages to any individual or organization without the latter's approval.

Further reports show that the company that registered all the numbers in the Ningbo case was founded in 2006 and its main business is to provide telephone numbers and other technologies so that their "clients" can inundate people with sales calls and junk messages. It is time for law enforcers to sharpen their tools so as to strike such gray businesses.