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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.
Sounds like they have a good time with it but they should post the calls on a website of shame so we can all hear them.
I wish someone would write an app were you can press a button on the phone and hang up and a smart adaptive talking application takes over and provides selective responses such as "can you repeat that bit again" or "right, tell me more" or "cool sign me up" and massively wastes these evil telemarketers time.
How well would a system like this go in the states? I'm sure some telemarketing firm here, if they got hit with something like this with any regularity, would get litigious and try to play the 'they're interfering with our ability to do business' card, and frankly, it might have half a prayer--especially if the conflict arose between dueling telcos.
I suppose, if used at the subscriber's election (opt-in strictly) on their live telephone line, it could have limited uses...but setting up 4 million lines strictly as honeypots, aside from the legality question...it would be tough to get a good distribution of numbers (across all area codes/prefixes owned by a given telco) given that a good number of NPAs are already tapped (returns and such allow SOME turnover, but not much).
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
Laws against certain types of telemarketing just pushed it offshore.
Better spam filters in turn created better spammers.
I will watch with a sort of morbid curiosity what the telemarketing industry comes up with next, assuming that this idea makes their current business model unworkable.
The do not call register in Australia has worked surprisingly well for me. I've had a very very small number of calls that were flat out illegal. We get calls from people trying to get us to sell raffles for charities (which are legal but have to call within certain hours) but they all use listed numbers so we simply don't answer them, and we let withheld numbers go to voicemail most of the time (the phone is configured to not even ring when a withheld number calls).
The Do Not Call and Do Not Mail lists in Australia are a great help to Telemarketing companies like us. We pay for flagfalls on all our calls, and we use two predictive diallers to do the job so our telcom bills were always high. It basically gives us a list of people who are certainly not going to buy things over the phone from us. Since the DNC list was put into place, our call to sale ratio went up considerably. Thanks ADMA!
Submit this idea to Reddit. MrBabyMan or one of his cronies will repost it on Digg the next day, and then 4chan crew will swoop in and do anything in their power to make it happen.