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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.
There is an app for this and it's called Asterisk.
You can also do this with sipgate via Asterisk on any cell phone if you publish a sipgate number and route through to your cell and configure Asterisk do the filtering, which it can also intercept a whitelist/blacklist caller and then start playing games with them.
The cheap way of doing this is to let Google Voice be your answering machine, and change your voice message to "Hello? (4 second pause) Oh I'm sorry I'm not here." That is enough to trick most autodialers into routing your voicemail to a live operator, who then has the option of revealing who they are or hanging up and calling again. I don't accept blocked/800/877 and Unavailable caller ID. At least with Google Voice's translate feature I can bulk delete most of the crap voicemails without listening to them and if I did dump a call to VMX that was a legit caller I can read their voicemail and return it.
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.
Headline should be: "Telemarketer failed the Turing test."
But I guess this is not as much breaking news as it is a confirmation, .
This comment may contain speech figures. Reader discretion is advised.
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.
We need an opt in list.
Then it should be published on the internet because it is those bastards who are the ones who have kept the spammers in work all these years, while the rest of us have been trying to get rid of them!
They deserve vilification just as much as the spammers themselves.
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.
At cursory glance of TFA(s), they appear to be just an ISP with that happens to subscribe to a whole lot more incoming phone numbers than they currently use in their own office, which simply isn't all that uncommon in a world of VoIP and PRI for any business.
The offer VoIP services, including routing calls from POTS to VoIP for their customers. The numbers that they have are ones that have not yet been assigned to a customer. You typically get these assigned in large blocks, and they appear to now be using all of the ones that are assigned to them but not yet given to a customer for the honeypot.
As an added bonus, by the time that they are given to a customer, it's likely that they will likely already be blacklisted by telemarketers, making these numbers more attractive to potential customers than ones from other companies.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I work closely with lots of companies in the UK who use a particular predictive dialler. And as such I know that most of these companies are small 10-50 agent setups. Most of the time they have nothing more than the script on a screen, a headset and a 2ft wide desk. It's horrible.
To get to my point... I know for a fact that most companies don't subscribe to the TPS list, and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to use it. I hear some of the support calls come though, and the questions are just terrible/illegal.
The favourite question is "how do I set up pinging". Pinging is basically taking a number range (say 0777xxxxxxx to 0779xxxxxxxx) and ringing each number in sequence. You only connect the call for 1/3rd of a second, so the result is the phone doesn't ring, it just makes a "ping" noise. It is a very bad thing to do. The point is people who are breaking the law by pinging are no going to care about TPS.
There are other regulations, such as "drop rate" which s a measure of how many calls you can throw away without connecting. In the UK it is set at 3% in any 24 hour period. Guess how many try and comply with this....
Generally in the industry, people will try and trick they can. When banned from one provider... switch. The never ending cycle continues.
Posting anon for obvious reasons!
You didn't read the article did you?
1. they do have 4 million numbers, they're not a phone compnay but an ISP that offers VoIP services.
2. The numbers they have are assigned to them, and are obviously able to be called, but ar not handed out to a subscriber yet (so technically,A&A are the subscriber).
3. They added every one to the TPS list - that is the correct thing to do. The message they play says the right things, giving the caller a chance to realise its a wrong number before going off on one - its just that telemarketers play a recording, and only connect to a human if you press a key, hence the beep near the beginning of each of the traps they have on the website. Regular people are going to hear the initial 'this is not a valid number'.
If its just an auto-dialer playing a taped message, the honeypot might be ineffective, although it still spares the subscriber from getting these calls.
I used to work in the telemarketing business, in the back room managing the data so I may have some uncommon insight here.
Legitimate telemarketers work off large lists of numbers, provided by their customers. In this case though it may be simply the list was generated as a complete block of an entire exchange or three. Anyway, the list when provided gets scrubbed against any DNC lists, usually one for client, one for state (by area code) and one exceptions list. (screamers, 911 and other emergency services, cell phone and fax blocks, etc) Sounds like these clods are also skipping that step. By scrubbed I mean dispositioned a DNC termination, that number will not be called.
Anyway, the dial servers are dialing lines faster than all the TCs on the floor can answer. They auto pace their dialing so they get on average someone that has just answered their phone just in time for a TC to become available (off previous call) to keep our TC idle time as low as possible. (cranking up the pass call rate beyond a certain % is also illegal, maybe they're doing that too? that's what gets you calls where there's nobody there when you answer)
So, the TCs can disposition a call such as "no thank you", "call me back later", "answering machine", or some form of sale. Non terminating dispositions just get you dropped back into the pool for calling back again. Robocalls can disposition calls too, such as detecting answering machines or quick hangups. So, having a machine play a recorded message may not help any, depending on how the call gets dispositioned. Or it may cause that number in the list to get terminated and never called again. Depends on what they want to do. I remember getting robocalls for "your new car warranty is about to expire!" almost continuously for a month. In those cases it didn't matter if you took the call, let it ring, or put it on a machine, you'd still get called again in a few hours. But that's not very efficient. They were being highly illegal so for them they probably were more interested in take-the-money-and-run rather than trying to work out an efficient call method for the long haul.
The effectiveness of the honeypot comes down to a battle of resources. The object of the honeypot is to tie up their resources to such a degree that their cost-to-revenue drops below acceptable and they move on. Lets say they are robocalling a block of 10,000 numbers, only 4,000 of which are used. If they call a number that is unused, and you play back an easily identifiable recording, it may be caught by the dialer even before the TC gets it, in which case the dialer dispositions it recording, which may terminate it. In that case, by the time they've gone first pass through all 10k numbers, all 6,000 inactive numbers are terminated and will not be reattempted. So they now focus round 2 on what's left of the 4,000 live bodies. This method fails to deter them because it's only a VERY minor inconvenience on pass 1 only.
If you can get to the TCs and they have to disposition it, you take up a little bit more of their resources in manpower, but you're still very unlikely to survive the first pass. 98% of the recorded disconnect notices will be terminated by the TCs on round 1 and never called again. Again you have not accomplished much.
It becomes much more effective when you can take up their time, such as what this guy is doing. Stall them, tie up a TC and a line on their end, for as long as possible. In the above example, lets say they have 50 TCs taking calls. If 60% of the numbers they call are spoof recordings, you are tying up 30 of their 50 TCs at a time. Assuming you have the tech resources to pull this off, it's wonderful. You have just dropped their conversion rate 60%. If they have anywhere else to call, they will do so, quickly. If they don't give up, they either have nowhere else to cal
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.