Slashdot Mirror
When Telemarketers Harass Telecoms Companies
farnz writes "Andrews & Arnold, a small telecoms company in the UK, have recently been hit with an outbreak of illegal junk calls. Unlike larger firms, they've come up with an innovative response — assign 4 million numbers to play recordings to the telemarketers, put them on the UK's Do-Not-Call list and see what happens. Thus far, the record is over 3 minutes before a telemarketer works out what's going on." The sound quality (and the satisfying humor) of the recording gets better as it goes on.
Hmmm... permutations of random interactions and voice prompting plugged into a genetic algorithm. Best series of responses wins.
Epic.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I find it interesting that this is another, alternative, way that spam encourages the development of AI --- just think of the fun of having a reply-bot which could string these guys out for as long as the bot passes the Turing test!
1. Find two telemarketers who call you at (roughly) the same time.
2. Put them on the phone with each other.
3. ???
4. Hilarity ensues.
We need a port of ELIZA to a robust voice-recognition platform with text-to-speech of the responses :)
Dunno about the US one, but the objection UK telemarketers usually have to it is that it is kind-of expensive. My company used to do telemarketing as follow-ons from our (business-to-business) mailshots, but access to the TPS database costs about £5,000 per annum, which was hard to justify for us: our turnover was only about £30,000 at the time so it would have become our single largest expense and thus sunk a huge chunk of our profits. We therefore had to stop doing marketing calls.
A nobel peace prize?
I was told I was eligible for a loan, and I thanked them profusely for it. I explained that I was a bankrupt, and that his message to me was such welcome news.
He kept asking how much my wife earned - I explained I didn't know as she kept that from me, but I didn't think her disposable income was high because she had to support my son's drug habit. Managed to spin that one out for quite a while.
Another time I annoyed the telemarketer so much that after he hung up on me he rang back to abuse me.
This http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html is also fun to follow.
We prefer the term flatulist. But alas, with the passing of Joseph Pujol's gas-passing, the golden age of flatulence is gone. YouTube fart lighters are at best a distant bronze. The more distant the better.
This is the funniest prank to a telemarketer I've heard homeowner acts as a detective at a murder investigation. Disclaimer, it's from bob and tom so they do the background laughing annoyance - but still good.