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.

Comments

There is an app for that.

[Camel Pilot]

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.

Re:There is an app for that.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a captcha on my asterisk.

Someone dials me and i greet them with, press 1 if you want to talk to us. Telemarketers dialing machines dials a number, waits for an answer and then connects it to a free agent. This message is lost to them. If you haven't pressed 1 you are in an infinite loop.

Re:There is an app for that.

[mrmeval]

I want any call that comes in without caller ID to do that without ever fking ringing my phone. And get this, I'd pay the app writer a premium if their adaptive voice app keeps the shitheels on the phone for more than 5 minutes. Even better if this worked in concert with the service provider so I could still get calls.

Myself and some friends played a game in the 90s for a short time called "Fk the telemarketer", this was with land lines as cellphone time was too expensive. The goal was to keep them on the line for excessive amounts of time.

1 point per minute
10 points for every bogus credit card number given
20 for every bogus checking acount number given
100 points for a call back number
1000 points for death threats

The main idea was to record the call and then pick the best on the weekend listening to the recordings, playing D&D and drinking.

My 'feeble old man' was usually the winner and my best ran over 10 minutes of me 'trying to find another card' after having given them a few bogus cards.

I have to say that recording is brilliant in it's timing. I always thought an Elisa style program done with a text to speech program was the way to go but did not have the coding skills so lost interest.

The group I hung out with broke up and drifted apart. A few dunked phones and lost emails and a level of paranoia about 'real names' and I doubt I could find them again. I did keep in touch with two of them but the connection is tenuous at best and I've not heard from them in a few years.

Re:There is an app for that.

[91degrees]

You just need to learn to make wasting time more valuable. I love wasting the time of these people.

One time I had someone getting very defensive when I managed to get them to agree they'd started with what was essentially a lie (I'd "won" something). Another time I shifted the conversation onto what colour underwear the caller was wearing.

I make a game of it. Do I have nothing better to do? Well, I could be reading Slashdot or watching TV - in other words, nope.

Re:There is an app for that.

[jparker]

My uncle used his six-year-old as that "smart adaptive application". Kid loved talking on the phone, so he got any telemarketer. Would often take them quite a while to work out that the excited claims of "Gosh!" and "Wow!" weren't really leading to a sale.

Re:There is an app for that.

[dotgain]

Where I live, many government agencies such as Police and the Tax Department call from blocked numbers. Ignoring the obvious joke that you don't want to talk to these people anyway, the reality is you'll often get calls from numbers that aren't in your phonebook. My income certainly would suffer if I adopted your suggestion, ever job I've ever got in the last ten years would have resulted from saying "Hello?" to a stranger.

Re:There is an app for that.

[Mr. Underbridge]

It's fun, isn't it? Those of us with sadistic tendencies but these inconvenient scruples get to have fun without the guilt picking on people we don't even feel remotely sorry for.

I've answered the phone as Satan, I've tried converting a telemarketer to Zoroasteranism, all great fun. One of my favorites, though, was when I had one trying to sell me windows and I told her my house burned down. It took a couple minutes before it dawned on her that I was talking on my landline - ergo, house exists. I told her the phone was the only thing that survived, but she didn't believe it, and the level of triumph in her voice was pathetically hilarious.

Another one of my favorites with surveys is to patiently take them and do what I can to poison the data. Probably the best thing you can do to hurt these assholes.

Re:There is an app for that.

[bsDaemon]

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see Article 23:

Article 23.

        * (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
        * (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
        * (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
        * (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Re:There is an app for that.

[ultranova]

Where I live, many government agencies such as Police and the Tax Department call from blocked numbers.

Government agencies can contact me in writing if they must. In fact I find it far more likely that an unkown number calling me and claiming to be the police is actually a fraudster.

Out of curiosity: why is a government agency going out of its way to make it hard for you to confirm their identity when they contact you?

Ignoring the obvious joke that you don't want to talk to these people anyway, the reality is you'll often get calls from numbers that aren't in your phonebook.

I don't want to talk to them, especially unprepared and wondering if I'm talking to a fraudster. I want a letter inviting me to either visit or call them or mail another letter, with sufficient time to think what I'm going to say.

And yes, I'll often get calls from such numbers; avoiding that is the whole point of this kind of block.

My income certainly would suffer if I adopted your suggestion, ever job I've ever got in the last ten years would have resulted from saying "Hello?" to a stranger.

If you work in a field where employees compete for employers, congratulations; but please understand that for most people it's the other way around, so strangers contacting us are far more likely trying to get than to give us money.

Re:There is an app for that.

[Barny]

My record is over 18 min I have handed the one telemarketer around to different staff members who keep "why did they forward you to us? we are HR/Billing/IT/whaterver. You will need to talk with Accounts, I will just put you through..." and forward the call to another co-worker and tell them to leave em on hold for 30sec and then answer and BS your way into getting them back onto hold :)

Re:There is an app for that.

[Skuld-Chan]

Having actually done telemarketing (only for a month - couldn't stand it) the managers there *freaked out* over any call that lasted more than a minute - not even kidding - they came unglued doubly so when there was no sale.

One of them explained to me they had a special agreement with the phone company where the initial part of the call was cheap, but went up over time (not sure if they do this in the UK) - so a 2-3 minute call would cost them a lot more than normal. Home long distance services its the reverse - the call price goes down the longer you stay on.

So yes - wasting their time really does piss them off to no end.

Re:There is an app for that.

[Peach Rings]

A computer would be more able to play back pi to a hundred digits than a human. But I'd like to see a computer try to solve:
Press only the key corresponding to the nth letter of the word "[dynamically selected word here]" where n is the number of letters in "[other dynamically selected word here]". And the words would be homonymous like their/theyre/there, inside sentence context so a human can easily tell which meaning is intended.

Okay telemarketers - your move!

[jamesh]

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).

Re:Okay telemarketers - your move!

[jamesh]

That's a good idea on the surface but on the basis that these guys are already breaking the law, they can just set up a voip connection themselves locally (even on a compromised PC) and just bounce the call off that. Then they are no longer calling from overseas as far as anyone can tell.

Re:Okay telemarketers - your move!

[mysidia]

Then whoever provided the VoIP access account, whichever customer signed up for it (or the provider, in case of a fraudulent customer) will be on the hook for paying all those $0.50 charges to the government, as soon as it's shown that the caller identity was fake.

As in, the law should state $0.50 is due for each VoIP call connected to a PSTN gateway, and it can only be waived, if the provider can prove their customer is in the US, and the caller id they send shows their working US phone number.

If the account becomes compromised, and that fact is discovered, then those fees are due to the government retroactively.

That way, there is a financial incentive, for organizations to take reasonable measures to secure their voip-connected systems.

Preventing the PSTN from being disrupted or made useless for its critical purposes certainly trumps orgs wanting the convenience of easy connectivity without taking basic due diligence steps to secure their networks

Re:Okay telemarketers - your move!

[sjames]

It' remarkable if you stop and think about it for a moment. An entire industry devoted to calling people who don't want to be called in order to offer them products they don't want to buy.

Honestly, it sounds like something Douglas Adams would come up with.

Re:Okay telemarketers - your move!

[Magic5Ball]

If the caller persists despite your objections, you can always go to the police about harassment and obtain a police report number, and inform the caller of such. If the same caller persists, it quickly becomes criminal harassment. This mechanism pre-dates and operates outside of do not call lists.

Do Not Call lists really help TM companies

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Do Not Call lists really help TM companies

[afidel]

Yep, my friend works for a telemarketer in the nonprofit space and the various DNC lists just reduce the size of the huge database tables he has to work with (hundreds of millions of rows). They spend a great deal of time and energy trying to find the optimum person to call in each neighborhood, they want the person that's most likely to not only say yes, but who will get their neighbors to donate as well. That way they spend the lowest amount per dollar raised.

Re:Sounds like a good time

[arivanov]

The problem is that the marketeer does not care.

Current TPS regulations punish the marketeer and do nothing about the company that ordered it and for the carrier supporting it. As a result unsolicited marketing has simply moved abroad. It started as far back as 2003 and has been moving full steam in that direction.

It is not a regulatory regime it is a marketing joke promoted by marketeers so not surprisingly as anything that is solely marketing driven it does not quite work.

Re:Sounds like a good time

[Coren22]

The US national DNC registry also allows non profits to call you, in fact it appears they use that list as a call list. When you add your number, suddenly you get tons of calls from people asking for money for a non profit. Also kind of sleazy.