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.
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.
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.