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Fighting Back Against Ghost Calls
An anonymous reader writes "You're doing something interesting. The phone rings. You get up, pick up the phone, and hear only silence. It could be a slasher waiting outside your house, but it's probably an errant computer at a telemarketer. This article describes how some are fighting back by setting up websites to track the worst telemarketers by their caller ids. The article mentions whocalled.us (one of the funnier urls I've ever seen), 800notes.com and numberzoom.com . One intrepid guy is even writing a program to check these sites when the call comes in before ringing the phone."
I really don't see the application of this information. If you get a call with an ID that you don't recognize, do you really want to run to your computer first to decide whether or not to answer?
And to make it even less useful, I checked two of the sites listed: whocalled.us and numberzoom.com. The first one was painfully slow (slashdotted perhaps?) and the second one was mostly a wiki with lots of numbers that have no information. You can look up a number, and then find that nobody has added any information on it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I always presumed it was telemarketers who, in order to act more efficiently, would call multiple targets at once, then only connect to the first who picked up the phone, dumping the rest. This avoids the statistically costly tedium of reaching answering machines after x rings, or just waiting for 5 rings to hang up. After all, if you're in a state of existence where telemarketing or managing telemarketers is your main concern in life, a little extra inconvenience for random phone users would not be a key concern compared to profit ratio over time.
Ryan Fenton
My home phone, I screen with the answering machine. Swore I never would do, but have.
Similar with my mobile. Any incoming call from an unknown number I do not answer, let the voice mail sort it, if they leave a message. I had one call from a Las Vegas area code and Googled it. Turns out it's simply a call to see if someone answers, then they add it to a list they pass along for phone scams, holiday trip specials, time-shares, etc. Most people who have dealt with these people have come to regret it.
My though is this: If these people are known scumbags and there's already sufficient discussion of them and their tactics on internet forums, why haven't law enforcement done anything? I know in the USA there's such a thing as Wire Fraud.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My though is this: If these people are known scumbags and there's already sufficient discussion of them and their tactics on internet forums, why haven't law enforcement done anything? I know in the USA there's such a thing as Wire Fraud.
Because there isn't a lobby to convince Congress that they're a menace to law, order, and our purity of essence. Quite the opposite in fact, the DMA convinces them that the very engines of society will grind to a halt should any regulation be enacted that requires marketers to shoulder the onerous burden of obeying the law.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Hmmm... there goes my automated video game reservation messages, my Blockbuster overdue messages, automated messages from companies telling us our product has shipped, and any other ligitimate and useful automated phone message you might receive for appointments, etc.
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
You may have been being ironic, but that's exactly what I do. I only have a landline anymore because I'm required to in order to have DSL (alternative being Comcast. Not happening.)
The only people who call the landline are telescum. Everyone important has my cell phone number.
I usually just hang up if there's no answer. But sometimes, I'll play their game. They invade my privacy, I figure I'm within my rights to ask a few questions:
I'm all for wasting telemarketer's time, and I agree that you have every right to know as much about them as they know about you, but you can't say that they are invading your privacy by calling you. The mere fact that you own a phone and have a number means that you expect people to call you. Granted their reasons or methods by which they gained your number may be questionable, but if you want to complain about them, do it correctly. Invading your privacy would be them knocking your door down after you closed it in their face.
By the way, I'm assuming that you have caller-ID (who doesn't?), why do you answer the phone if you don't know the number on the display? Wasting their time is fun, but it's your time too. Just a thought.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Funny story from years back.
The father is waiting for a call for a job interview. He'd occasionally do this, and nine times out of ten, something would go awry, usually due to my sister and I, who were fairly young at the time, running around at his feet or some such antics. I honestly don't know why he never got a study with a lock on the door for these things.
Anyway, this particular evening, we kept getting these "ghost calls". About half a dozen at least. Everyone of course assumed that it was a prank caller or something like that, as this was back before mobile phones came in and ghost calls, or one way ghost calls, became fairly common. I found it quite amusing, but my sister started getting more and more annoyed. She easily became irate.
Anyway, the phone rings one more time, and the sister, who by now is eager to give the "prank caller" a piece of her mind, picks up the phone and roars "LEAVE US ALONE!!!" into the handset. You guessed it; the guy for the job interview was on the other end of the line. Good times. I believe the ghost calls had been this guy trying to get through all along.
The morals of the story are: "Never assume that ghost calls are automatically stalkers." and of course "Always confirm the identity of the caller before you hurl abuse at them".
Oh and " Do not have the job interviewer call you at home if you have small children "
May the Maths Be with you!
Yes, Ryan, you are correct. I'm in the industry, and many of the call centers use predictive dialers, which anticipate how many concurrent outbound calls the machine should be making in order to maximize efficiency of the employees while not pissing off too many people. Actually, the regulated hard number is 3% - you can't have more than 3% of your outbound customers pick up phones filled with silence!
Does everyone stay below that number? No.
-R
Reading through this thread I see that many have suggested technical solutions or humorous responses to "ghost" type telemarketing calls. I simply don't have the time or the patience to waste on such "solutions" and simply hang up, even if the phone droid is droning on.
The next time you receive one of these calls, just hang up. Don't waste your time, don't install some advanced phone system, don't engage in conversation, don't get angry and don't try and be funny (unless you are). Just hang up the fucking phone and get on with your life.
I've mentioned this piece of junk before, but I think that award should go to the Samsung phone I used to have where holding down "9" would dial 911, even when key lock was turned on. Arrrrrrrggh.
Not surprisingly, this behavior made the 911 operators angry. It made me even angrier since I started to fear I might eventually be arrested if I kept carrying the phone. Of course I ditched the phone.