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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."
They're compiling a list of numbers that they're going to provide to others... of companies or individuals... who they're targeting... for... You know this sounds a lot like what they're complaining about, to me.
Next up, a phone that connects to the internet, checks the number, than picks up without ringing and starts playing a tape of you acting interrested in what the telemarketeer says only to hang up after an hour. Either that or pick up and hang up immediately so the line stays clear. Whatever costs the telemarketeer most. All without the phone ever bothering you ofcourse.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
forgot to lock the keys on my cell phone and my phone called my friend 14 times!
Doh!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Very easy solution.. just install asterix and make your own voice menues people have to navigate to get to the actual phone... no more automated messages or other annoyinaces..
You can even make diffent paths for telemarketeers.. and if they select the "I am family or friend" then they have actually allready lied once.. hmm.. starts to sound like a solution I have to implement..
Should only take a couple of hours..
I'd rather have somebody do something about that slasher outside...
I did. Perhaps mine sounded a bit *too* prerecorded, because they wouldn't stay on very long. A generic one that just looped through "Yes"...."Uh-huh"..."okay"...."muted grunt." seemed to work much better. Especially if there were longer pauses. Sad part - is how bored was I one weekend to do such a project is another discussion.
Check the so called "Torture" dialplan for asterisk. It already does most of that. Cheers,
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Kevin Smith on Prince
Most of these ghost calls arrive because the automated dial systems telemarketers use dial several calls at once, and the first one that answers gets patched to the telemarketing stooge, while others that answer a few seconds later give that spooky silence for 5-10 seconds before they are hung up. The system logs the fact that you answered. Don't worry -- they'll call back to give you some love later.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
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.
What's wrong with landlines? They are still functional during a power outage (Hurricane hit spots, Windstorm frequented areas). Internet connection down and need to make a call? Oh yeah the landline (duh of course this is valid if you don't have a cellphone or bad cellphone coverage at your home and/or bad signal). DSL (although some providers provide DSL without a landline). An uh....when broadband goes down, you can still dialup. Yes this is 2007 and landlines aren't quite the proverbial floppy disk (oh wait...)
Telemarketers aren't fooled by that. Acting interested is the wrong way to go. You need to record yourself saying things like "I'm right in the middle of dinner" or "this isn't a good time". Then they'll be on line forever.
I can't remember if it was the local radio show or a syndicated one that I listen to that had a guy on it who recorded his own pranking of telemarketer calls. He had one where he started off asking the telemarketer how he knew $IntendedRecipient and kept the guy on for about five minutes during which it evolved that there had been a murder, and that the telemarketer was now a suspect. They actually got the guy to admit where he was calling from and indicated that they were calling his local sheriff, and that he was not to move from his desk until the sheriff arrived. It was priceless.
I think it is disgusting when people prank call innocent Chinese takeout places, people's stay-at-home wives, and so forth, but a telemarketer is open game in my opinion.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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
Obviously never seen www.gotahoe.com
And powergenitalia (PowerGen Italia) was a myth.
Never mind. There's always whorepresents, expertsexchange, and Australia's molestationnursery, now renamed.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
I donno, I mean the Telecrapper 2000 works astonishingly well. Keep in mind that most telemarketers aren't paid much and check their brain in at the door. The sheer repetition of reading off their prompts probably makes them less adept at figuring out that ti's a computer right away.
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
I've set up an Asterisk box on my phone line, and a nifty CGI script that lists incoming calls from the call detail record database. With one click, it can do a whocalled.us lookup on the number, and with another click, I can blacklist it. Once it's in the blacklist, when they call again, I get blessed silence, while the junk caller gets SIT tones (boop-bap-BEEP!) and a recorded message not to call again.
I can also blacklist the last caller by picking up the phone and dialing *60, if I'm not at a computer.
I've noticed that certain blocks of numbers are rather spammy, so I'll go ahead and blacklist blocks of ten or 100 numbers when I start noticing a pattern. I'm not interrupted nearly as much as I used to be.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I'm keeping a landline until we come up with another way to leave the Matrix.
I want all phones to have that program to block the ghost calls.
Putting it on the phones is not efficient enough. It should just be put on the telco's switches.
Of course that would go over as well as ISP filtering your spam for you. Also, it would pretty effectively kill the jobs of 5% of the adult U.S. population.
Why do we still have such a problem with telemarketing even after the DNC registry? I would guess my calls got cut back by 25% or so, but most of the calls are from agencies which are exempt (but should not be) from the DNC, charities and politicians.
Now, many telemarketers are still able to get through because charities are paying telemarketing agencies to bug you.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
Don't answer the phone?
Ye I do, ecause I do't ike he crappy overcmpressd audo uality tha ireless hones ave.
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
I have a couple of solutions I use when telemarketers call. Now if more people used these methods ...
.............. and set the phone down, and wait. I had one guy hang on for 1/2 hour for me to get back ... SUCKER
..... (maybe considered a variant of 2)
1) Answer the phone, tell the person on the other end you're right in the middle of something, but if they hold on
2) Act Crazy. Talk about Aliens, UFOs, Bigfoot, whatever. Paranoidism also works. "Why do you keep calling me, what do you want"
3) Start Preaching about Buddha, Jesus, Allah, Moses, Vishnu
4) Ask if the other person is into "phone sex" and start talking dirty.
5) Try to sign them up for MLM (Amway)
6) Pretend to be abusing/being abused by your SO, while on the phone. "Stop it you bitch or I'll beat your ass again"
In fact, mix and match all you want and come up with some new ideas. ie combine 6 and 4, hilarious.
The point is, if you're having fun with it, and it wastes their time, and enough people do it, it becomes unprofitable waste of the actual human's time on the other end. The bonus is, since I've started doing this, the number of telemarketing calls has dropped to almost nothing.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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:
Now, understand that these people are paid by the hour. I'm not wasting their time, I'm wasting their employers time.
Telemarketing is profitable because most of the people who don't want to buy will just hang up the phone. If everyone they called insisted on having a nice, cordial, and polite conversation about political topics, the business model would fail entirely. So, if you hate telemarketing, use the calls as a nice way of promoting your favorite political party, religious position, human rights advocacy, etc... You might even explain to them such topics as:
Remember, it's a captive audience. Don't be afraid to speak your mind - people need to know!. Don't be intimidated by them. Rather, use the opportunity for political activism!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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.
A Dutch invention, from 1994. And then to think that in The Netherlands the problem has never been that bad! The counter-script it's called, and it's here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
From the website:
The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy.
Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.
I'm not affiliated with the site, I just happen to know about it. I never even tried it, when a telemarketer calls I usually just hang up.
Dude, get yourself a couple of beers and stop wasting your time. 90% of ghost calls you receive are VoIP. Spoofing caller ID is trivial in VoIP environment. You don't have to be a telemarketer to do it. There are services like http://www.grandcentral.com/ (where google will collects samples of your voice) or http://www.xebba.com/ where you can get free 800 or local number and call anywhere anonymously for a couple of cents per minute.
Unless you're whitelisting your calls (which comes with a risk of losing an important one), your application, whocalled.us, or anything else that relies on caller id is not going to stop telemarketers. Oh, and by the way, they have a fleet of programmers with substantially better telephony skills that yours.
...with the new generation. My son and all his friends will absolutely not leave a message no matter what. At home, when my son's friends call and I ignore them because he is not home, they will not leave a message. They simply call back every so often until someone answers. if it is of an urgent nature, they call more frequently. My son once called me five times in the space of four minutes when I was in a meeting and couldn't answer. He never once left a message, which I could have listened to during the meeting to determine if it was actually important. You can try explaining this stuff to the new generation, but they don't get it.
Pardon me, there seem to be some teenagers on my lawn.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I treat every telemarketing call I get like a ghost call:
(phone rings) me: Hello?
caller: Hi, this is so-and-so from somewhere and we're conducting a research...
me: Hello? Is anywhere there?
caller: Hello? Can you hear me?
me: Hello? (pause) Hello?
caller: Can you hear...
me (yelling away from phone): I don't know who it is honey, I can't hear anything.
caller: Hello?
I can keep them on for maybe a minute sometimes. They don't usually call back.
here we go: radio on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_PjRXV5l8
My land line is always on an answering machine. I never pick it up and neither does any of my frriends. Basically the phone service has turned into a voice messaging service decades ago already - no interactive yakking.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I would, but Getafix ran away with all my potion.
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!
> 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.
"Press 1 to speak to Fuzzyuw or press 2 to leave a message". Record whatever they say (even if they don't press anything) unless they press 1 in which case you ring the phone. The telemarketing clerks will have been told to hang up immediately when they get a machine.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
When the victim's phone is answered, the dialer has to rapidly determine if the voice on the other side is human or machine. To do this, they try to analyze the greeting. The dialer wants to hear the word "Hello", followed by silence. Actually, it wants to hear ANY sound for about half a second, with a few seconds of silence.
To waste more of the telemarketer's time, consider changing your outgoing message:
OLD: "You have reached the Smith residence. We are not available at the moment, but leave your name and number so we can get back to you."
NEW: "Hello [3 second pause] You have reached..."
This should cause the dialer to connect the call to a telemarketer, who will miss about 5 seconds of your message, but they will hear the rest. Obviously, the telemarketer will hang up in a few seconds, but not before wasting a little more time. I think of it as redirecting the annoyance back to the source.
Which only leaves automated callout systems which aren't evil in the cold. Like, automated appointment reminders from the doctor's office. Which is a valid use of the technology.
This is yet another technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you choose to unilaterally reject a whole chunk of the incalling behavior spectrum, you can make it work for you. All that's requires is you decide the behavior (automated outdial, for instance) is evil, rather than the use (spamming versus "opt-in" reminders).
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
With the advent of new technology, comes new social norms. For the kids that have grown up with the internet, instant messaging, and cell phones, instant access is the norm for them. As far as their experience shows them, they don't have to wait for anything. Everything is available to them now. The idea of leaving a message and awaiting a reply seems as antiquated as contacting you by courier pigeon.
On second thought, that would actually be quite effective. They can let you out of the meeting early, or let your courier pigeon crap all over the table.
Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationary available. -D. Parker
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
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
You wanna play a tape!? What is the world coming to? Any real geek would slap together a program that passes the Turing test, hook it to a speech synthesizer, and have it chat away with the telemarketer. And he'd do it in Perl or LISP!
Shame on you! You should turn in your pocket protector.
Damn kids. Stay off my lawn!
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
If you live in St. Paul, MN, sometimes you get automated phone calls declaring a snow emergency.
The call itself I don't mind(time to move the car), but their choice of caller ID string is the worst one possible. It's 911-000-0000.
Just imagine old folks clogging up 911 call centers trying desperately to call back after the resulting confusion. Ramsey county can't afford a phone number that just plays back the same message when you call back? It just HAS to be 911, huh?
I know it's the caliber of telemarketers, but it's still stupid.
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.
Did you read his idea?
If the caller presses 1 the phone will ring.
If the caller presses 2 they can leave a voice mail.
If the caller does NOT press a button you still record what they say and save it as a voicemail.
So the only way to hear the phone ring, would be if someone called you and pressed 1. If its a computer system, you will get the voicemail.
Sounds good to me.
There are lots and lots of telemarketers out there that want to talk to people. There are also lots and lots of people who don't get out much - elderly, live a long way from town, whatever. Shouldn't we be putting one group of people in touch with the other? Even better, people with anger management issues or those who are just having a bad day could sign up for the service, called something like "ripthepissoutofatelemarketer.com" (I haven't checked - maybe it's still available?) and get all of their issues off their chest with someone who actually wants to talk to them!
Having worked (briefly) for a telemarketer, the "dialer" is a server with telcom hardware attached (ours was a SCO Unix box, ironically) and you feed it numbers to dial. Makes sense, right?
Long story short, to up your sales numbers you tell it to dial more numbers in advance. If the setting is too high, nobody's there on your end to take the call because they're all already talking to someone. The more numbers you dial the better chance someone's going to answer. There's a pacing algorithm too which takes into account the number of reps available and average call times and many other variables - but since upping the number typically gets you better sales figures... yeah you'll never guess what people do - they up the number.
There are federal regulations in place, however, specifically to limit this practice. Hard to enforce. These calls are probably not coming from a big and established telemarketer, but rather a small startup shop.
I'm a 2000 man.
ats jus cuz ur slo at it. speed up n get a plan wit free txt