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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."
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?
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.
Fun fact, this is what happens if the center "stick" on the Sony Ericsson k700i does if pressed repeatedly:
1. Menu
2. Text messages
3. New text message
4. Send message
5. Contact book
6. Pick top contact
7. Confirm send
It gets even better because that stick apparently sends repeat presses if held down. I once got a phone call from an unlucky woman who was at the top of my contact list, saying I had sent her 60 blank text messages...
Strangely enough, I've now made a "AAA" entry in my cell phone with a dummy number that goes nowhere. Whoever designed the damn thing should get a "stupidest design on market" award though.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
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.
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
you should point it back to your own number, that way it'll remind you on the first message that you forgot to lock your keys.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
ripthepissoutofatelemarketr.com for the full Web 2.0 effect.
ats jus cuz ur slo at it. speed up n get a plan wit free txt