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Beep! Beep! You have Broken the Law.
medscaper writes "Authorities in China are using computers to spam mobile phones of law-breakers until they turn themselves in. Apparently, lots of illegal advertisements as stickers with mobile-phone numbers listed are placed around large cities and are becoming an eyesore. So, the authorities call the cell phones incessantly with recorded messages that demand the "businessmen" to turn themselves in."
this "we're going to annoy the hell out of you" method of law enforcement is rather entertaining... imagine the fun someone could have by posting bills with the telephone number of your competition!
Proving that you did *not* post bills with your phone number could prove difficult but by that time, you've already racked up 543,766,246,742 voicemails and text messages.
Do they have free incoming text messages in China? I certainly hope so.. in addition to a fine, you'd have a whopping phone bill.
Hrm. maybe Verizon is in on this!
So basically, rather than taking the time to track these folks down, they're just going to annoy the culprits into submission...?
At first, I was going to say "why not just turn the phone off?"
But phone being off -> no incoming business calls either. Turn the phone on -> be spammed by police and have your minutes wasted. Turn yourself in -> no more spam + you getting a fine + you no longer hanging stickers.
But couldn't you just block whatever number the cops are calling from?
Ack!
How well does this actually work? Wouldn't they just get a new phone number?
From the article
Those who prefer to change their "poisoned" number rather than face punishment incur the fees and inconvenience of switching, and also lose any business their ad might have generated.
So changing the number comes with a pretty high price. Course, I'm "sure" after they get this message, every one goes right in and turns them selves in. I wonder how long it will take before someone figures out how to bypass this.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
This idea is all fine and dandy, but just asking for people to turn theirselves in won't work. It's all bark and no bite. It needs teeth. Now, if the police called me and said that if I didn't turn myself in by noon tomorrow, that they'd sic a naked Richard Simmons on me and have him follow me everywhere and even move into my house, *then* I'd want to turn myself into the authorities.
It may not work the first few times, people thinking it's a joke and no police force would be so cruel, but after the first few times it gets reported by the media and several suicides later, the criminals would get the hint.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
How long before the cell phone companies offer call blocking? They must have a limited bank of phone numbers these police calls can come from.
I know they have had something like that for a while on land lines here in the U.S. When my sister broke up with an abusive boyfriend she was able to block all calls from his phone number.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
I'm sure the answer exists somewhere in the middle ... it just seems I was lead to believe in a different future by Adam-12 and Dragnet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Erm, I suppose they get some information about where the guy is (what cell, or better via triangulation or radio waves), or who he is talking to, too.
.. WAP ! (argh.)
or (shudder) they'll force him to use
Isn't it obvious? Spammers annoy everybody because they can do so without cost. The police have found a way to cost them money, which may actually result in less (sticker) SPAM.
The logical extension is to apply the concepts of open source collaboration for email SPAM. Today a shady business can pay $5000 to a spammer to send 10,000,000 emails, and they get a profit because of the 0.01% response rate. Wouldn't it be a lot more fun if they got 10,000,000 emails and 10,000,000 web hits? Then let them try to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Stop filtering, and just hit REPLY
As far as I can remember, and I may be wrong, they took apart their target's telephone, wired it up with explosives and a special detonator. Then I believe they waited till their target was home, called them, made sure it was the target speaking on the phone, and then detonated the explosives using a special tone over the phone line...
Death to Reefer Addicts.
--
They did this about a year ago here in the Netherlands. Phones listed as stolen were sent a barrage of SMS messages, basically every couple minutes, making the phone nearly unusable (incessant beeping of arriving messages, full inbox, etc)
In the GSM system, there is a SIM card which is linked to your phone number, subscription, etc. You put this card into your phone and use it. The phone itself has a unique identifyer as well, the IMEI number. It was these serial numbers which were used to identify stolen phones. So putting in a new SIM card won't work, because the phone will still identify itself to the network with its IMEI number.
I never saw any report on how sucessfull this was, however. I can imagine that in a lot of cases the owner didn't even know it was stolen (if they bought it second hand)...
Anyways, seems like a good way to harass people who use stolen phones.
Cheers,
Costyn.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Back in the good ol days officers of the law had discression when it came to interpretation of the law. When I was a youngin and was caught blowing up the neighbors mailbox I wasn't made a posterchild for federal anti-blowing-up-stuff ads like today. I was repermanded by a 7 foot tall ogre with a gun and a badge. I stopped blowing up mailboxes reeeeal fast.
China's police figured out that jail and fines arent the way to stop most crime. It's all about the psychological punishment of having your phone ring untill your brain explodes. Hopefully more law enforcement agencies will catch on to the use of psycho-enforcement. (yey I coined another buzzword)
-bb
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
While this policy didn't seem to be having a discernable effect in HCMC, we didn't see the advertisements (at least not to the same degree) in other large cities (specifically Da Nang, Hue and Hanoi).