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I work from home and get tons of robo calls, and even if it's not a robot talking on the phone, marketing firms usually have some machine dialing the call and then hand it off to someone once the machine determines there's a human on the line. Ever wonder why you say hello and it takes the person on the other end a few seconds to respond? That's why. Phone captcha would eliminate these calls... at least for awhile until someone beats the captcha.

Buy a Telezapper.
http://www.telezapper.com/

When you (or your answering machine) picks up the phone, the telezapper plays a dialtone.
Humans just hear a tone, auto-dialers interpret it as "this line has been disconnected"

I got one for my parents, long before the Do Not Call list and after around a month, as your number gets taken off of auto-dialing lists, it makes a huge difference in the volume of calls that come in.

You can also do it, like I did for myself, by recording the tone onto the beginning of an answering machine message, but the telezapper works whenever you pick up the phone. So if you're fine with letting every "unknown number" go to the answering machine (my parents were not) you can implement the Telezapper's $40 functionality for free.

I think you're talking about the Telezapper A quick google search turned up a nice privacy page with useful, although fairly obvious recommendations: http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs3-hrs2.htm

Click here to hear a WAV file of the tone.

You can go here for the real TeleZapper website, which is a device that detects when you answer your phone, and plays the tone basically as you're saying "hello".

Asterisk has this sound built-in, so you can trigger it in your dialplan wherever you need.

Wikipedia has great information on the Special Information Tone, and other call progress tones that you probably just take for granted.

It's a commercial product and a helluva lot less satisfying than what you want. You WANT to take these guys out back and shoot them once in the head, but all you can really do is get them to stop calling.

Get a telezapper or similar product. http://www.telezapper.com/

It sends a "This number is disconnected" tone. Humans ignore it. Automated fax and telemarketer systems note it and remove your number from their database. Why call something which is known to be gone?

It's cheap, and it works fairly well.

Less mess in your local alley, too, though I'd still prefer the stronger solution.

Best phone purchase I ever made. Sends an "out-of-service" tone every time you pick up the phone or the answering machine does. Takes a month or so, and then most of them stop calling. After all, it's not like they all call you, they pay a few companies to call you. The few companies want to cut costs, so they drop your number -- it's out of service, anyhow, right?

Buy it at radioshack. It's cheap.

http://www.telezapper.com/

• When you do get a telephone solicitation, find out on whose behalf they are calling, ask that you be permanently removed from their calling list, and tell them that you are writing this information down. If they call back, demand to talk to a manager and complain and/or call the Consumer Protection Division of your local State Attorney General's office.
• Consider products such as the Telezapper and these.

For the telemarketers, you can pick up a Telezapper for about $20 at Best Buy or a similar store.

It seems silly, but it worked for me. It just removes your information from their automated dialing system, so after a few weeks the calls stop.

"How 'low' can they go?"

As low as they need to in order to make a buck.

Does this really suprise anyone? We've continuously seen spammers/telemarketers/advertisers/etc. sink lower and lower over the years as their tactics are countered. First there was telemarketing then the Telezapper gave us all a little hope that the incessant calls would stop. Then the telemarkters came up with a new tool that beat the telezapper. We responded with the Do Not Call Registry and now the telemarketers are suing on the basis of free speech. They will stop at nothing, not even the breaking the law, to make money.

Unfortuatly in the past couple years almost all telemarketers showup as 'unknown' anyway, so I have no way to prove I already talked to someone selling the exact same thing.

OK, so why make a law to dodge telemarketing calls? You could just not answer calls that have blocked numbers. You could get a TeleZapper. Verizon has Call Intercept. How hard is it to be proactive?

Um. Well, you'll be glad to hear that the First Amendment has nothing what so ever to do with anything in this thread.

I'll bold the relevant portions:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So actually, it has everything to do with it.

I dont care if they pitch their sales to people that care to hear it.
All I know is I dont want to hear it, have told them so, and am still _forced_ to listen to it aginst my will.

Really. Someone held you down and forced you to listen.

No.

No one forced you to lease a telephone line. No one forced you to answer that phone. And certainly, no one forced you to give your phone number out to some companies who decided to call you back.

The First Amendment does not grant you the right to force me into anything aginst my will.

First Amendment also does not grant you the right to pass laws abridging freedom of speech -- doesn't matter if you like the speech or not. Why do you think ignorant people still get to say "nigger" all the time?

And as to your "UNLIST YOUR NUMBER!!!" comment, thank you for suggesting what I did as I ordered the phone line 9 years ago. Got any suggestions that may have something to do with solving the problem of harassing calls?
As it would seem, adding or removing my number from the public phone books should have no physical means or otherwise to magically make that number removed from the telemarketers lists.

TeleZapper. Check your Caller ID box (that's what it's there for.) Change your phone number.

Proactivity is the key.

I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.

You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.

They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.

You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).

The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...

I used to get 5, 10, 15 telemarketing calls a week, more than I would get regular calls. I used to just put the phone down directly but it was driving me crazy. Now I use a telezapper equipped phone. It beeps briefly when you pick up at just the right pitch for the autodialers to believe that your line is out of service, and they hang up and automatically remove their number from their list. For the first 2 or 3 weeks I got a lot of hangups and silence on my answering machine. Then they pretty much stopped calling altogether after about a month - I guess they share data on bad numbers. 6 months on I find it hard to remember the last time I got a telemarketer call. All for about $10 extra on the phone I bought. Pretty amazing device. I read something about them starting to use autodialers that can defeat the Telezapper but apparently they haven't yet.

wow, that thing is REALLY a waste of money.
This company page implies that you'll still pick up the phone when it's a telemarketer, they'll just be disconnected AFTER you pick up the phone. Wow! A $40 device to hang up the phone!

I knew I shouldn't have spent $40 buying that damn Telezapper

• Political Calls
• Non-profits
• Anyone giving something away (like a sweepstakes)
• Anyone wanting to make an appointment (to sell you something.)

Sounds like you need the TeleZapper! :-)

How does the TeleZapper "zap" telemarketers?

The TeleZapper uses the technology of telemarketers' automatic dialing equipment against them. When you or your answering machine picks up a call, the TeleZapper emits a special tone that "fools" the computer into thinking your number is disconnected. Instead of connecting you to a salesperson, the computer stores your number as disconnected in it's database. Over time, as your number is removed from more and more databases, you'll see a dramatic decrease in the number of annoying telemarketing calls you receive.

That's how this Telezapper works.

I've had one of these babies for well over a year now. They're $50 and you can get them at Radio Shack. Works great, weeding out probably 90% of telemarketing calls. Looks like the other guys are starting to catch on.

Unfortunately, the majority of telemarketers know this and don't even use Caller ID, so these calls show up identified as "--unavailable--". I can tell my phone to reject those calls, but it takes at least one ring before the Caller ID info propagates to the phone, then only that phone stops ringing.

What this hasn't solved is the large number of nuisance hang-ups. I'm talking 5-10 per day. Sometimes there's no sound on the other end, sometimes you hear chattering of other people (like a so-called "boiler room" on telemarketers), sometimes just breathing. I'm considering getting one of those $50 TeleZapper boxes, but I'm wondering---how long before telemarketers come up with a countermeasure for it??

And for some humor (yeah, I wish it were true!), check out the last question on the TeleZapper page:
Does the TeleZapper create a computer virus for the caller?

Unfortunately, the majority of telemarketers know this and don't even use Caller ID, so these calls show up identified as "--unavailable--". I can tell my phone to reject those calls, but it takes at least one ring before the Caller ID info propagates to the phone, then only that phone stops ringing.

What this hasn't solved is the large number of nuisance hang-ups. I'm talking 5-10 per day. Sometimes there's no sound on the other end, sometimes you hear chattering of other people (like a so-called "boiler room" on telemarketers), sometimes just breathing. I'm considering getting one of those $50 TeleZapper boxes, but I'm wondering---how long before telemarketers come up with a countermeasure for it??

And for some humor (yeah, I wish it were true!), check out the last question on the TeleZapper page:
Does the TeleZapper create a computer virus for the caller?

You need the TeleZapper !! Does anyone here own a TeleZapper? Does this thing actually work? I can imagine the telemarketing companies devising a counter-attack soon..

The TeleZapper uses the technology of telemarketers' automatic dialing equipment against them. When you or your answering machine picks up a call, the TeleZapper emits a special tone that "fools" the computer into thinking your number is disconnected. Instead of connecting you to a salesperson, the computer stores your number as diconnected in it's database. Over time, as your number is removed from more and more databases, you'll see a dramatic decrease in the number of annoying telemarketing calls you receive.

Well, around here they advertise the Telezapper quite a bit. I haven't shelled out the $50 to try it, but after getting several calls yesterday that were obviously computers cold calling I'm thinking about it though.

It just sends out a couple of the tones from the "disconnected line" tone. You know, the one that plays the tones and then says: "We're sorry, the number you are dialing has been disconnected". Supposedly it "fools" the telemarketing dialing systems into placing your number on a disconnected number list so it doesn't call it again. I've been skeptical that it really works though. Anyone use these kinds of devices (or just put the tones on their answering machine as telespammer traps?).