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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."
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
Actually - the call is coming from inside the house!
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.
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
I used to work for a call center (as the DBA who handled all of the data) and you are pretty much correct about how it works. We had 40-60 callers working per any given shift, and our dialers were capable of dialing out about 120 numbers at once. There was a percentage (known/calculated statistic for this call center) of no-answer and busy signals, so they tried to tune it to be as efficient as possible. What would happen would be the 60 callers would be at their stations, and the call center computer would dial out 120 numbers. The first one that connects gets sent to the first caller (their phone rings, they pick it up and their screen is updated with that person's information), and so forth. Once all of the callers were engaged, or if too many of the people being called answered their phones at once, they were immediately disconnected. They called these 'nuisance calls' and the number of them was kept track of every night. They had a goal to stay under, and they usually made it. (I don't recall what the goal was, but it was greater than 0)
There are also two different types of dialing, one is usually called 'autodialing', where the caller is sitting there, looking at the information of the person they are about to call. They initiate the call, and are met with a standard result: Answer, no answer, busy, line dead, etc. This causes no nuisance calls, because the caller is only calling that one person.
The other kind of dialer is a predictive dialer, which dials ahead, and can cause the nuisance calls mentioned above. This is the most efficient method from a call-center point of view, because they can get through many more numbers. Lines that are no-answers, and busy never make it to the callers, so their time is spent with live calls.
And they said zombies weren't real!
This software already exists! It's a free open source application called Telecrapper 2000. It refers to a text file full of phone numbers deemed "annoying" by the user and checks caller ID when the phone rings. If the caller is on the list the Telecrapper jumps into action, playing WAV files and waiting for the person on the other end to pause before playing the next WAV. After a while Telecrapper resorts to a subset of WAV files and plays them randomly until the caller hangs up.
This cute Flash animation shows the Telecrapper in action. Hilarious stuff!