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.
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!
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.
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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.