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FTC Gets 744 New Ideas On How To Hang Up On Robocallers
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said the submission period for its Robocall Challenge had ended and it got 744 new ideas for ways to shut down the annoying automated callers. The FTC noted that the vast majority of telephone calls that deliver a prerecorded message trying to sell something to the recipient are illegal. The FTC regulates these calls under the Telemarketing Sales Rule and the Challenge was issued to developing technical or functional solutions and proofs of concepts that can block illegal robocalls which, despite the agency's best efforts, seem to be increasing."
Or maybe just actually investigate consumer complaints.
The problem is the law. There are so many loopholes in it you could drive a Mac truck through them. For example, the whole "if we did business with you before we can contact you again" part. There is no definition of "doing business" and it can include things like they sent you snail-mail spam. It also exempts the most annoying which are the political robocalls. In short, the law itself is contributing to the problem.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
There are so many loopholes in it you could drive a Mac truck through them.
Is Apple making wheeled vehicles now?
This works well for land lines. The calls stop. On my cell, it hasn't been much of a problem.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Somewhere along the line, it must be technically possible to identify that the number isn't coming from where it claims to be.
Most of the obvious fraudulent crap is all using fake caller IDs and they're calling another country.
If I could simply tell the phone company that I'm not willing to accept numbers which don't match their origin, that would kill off all of the crap I get. And I don't care about the legitimate ones, because by masking their real phone number they're no better than the scammers.
Unfortunately, these guys lobby hard enough that they make sure nobody could pass anything which cut into their business -- because they feel it's their legitimate right to call us.
It's gotten to the point where even the ones with legal exemptions like charities and political parties usually get an earful of profanity.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The problem is the law. There are so many loopholes in it...
Actually, if you look in the summary, that's exactly not what the FTC found. All of the loopholes are legal ways for companies to call you that are still not desired by the recipient. But the majority of robocalls, it says, are illegal. Meaning they're not driving through loopholes, they're just ignoring the law.
I've arrived at the point where I hate my land line. I'd drop it in a second but my wife thinks it's important. None of our friends or family ever call the land line, it's always trolls. I dunno.
But I digress. I had a new one last night. My land line rings and I can't help myself, I need to see what asshole it is this time. I've been getting a lot of survey calls recently and I'm now openly hostile to them "get a real job, f-ck off". This time it's a robocall collecting names for a class action lawsuit against a medicine. "Have you ever taken whateveritscalled and experienced the following side effects? Blah Blah Blah. If so you are entitled to receive penies on the dollar while our bloodsucking ambulance chasers get rich"
So now we have lawsuit trolling to look forward to.
Follow the money trail. Once you know what company is getting the money, find out who owns the company.
Once you find out who owns the company, you shoot them.
Problem solved.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I solve this problem by having asterisk prescreen all incoming calls. An IVR prompt requires you to press a combination of numbers before it actually rings any phones. A white and black list for caller ID data are used to bypass or simply play line disconnected tones and hang up.
It's the only reason I still have a POTS line. I never give out my cell.
The feds and ISP's are too busy busting kids for downloading movies in their dorm rooms.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It also helps to never give out your cell # except to friends and family. I found that a lot of the businesses I was giving my phone number to were somehow passing it along to telemarketers (I could tell because sometimes I would vary my name slightly just to see).
I ditched my land line a few years ago, but even my cell number wasn't immune. I'd still get calls from "Rachel" and her friends, not to mention "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!!!! This is your captain speaking . . ."
Worse, by far were the debt collectors calling for people I'd never heard of -- or even not asking for anyone in particular, just wanting a return call to some number to "clear up a file on my desk". Then if I did call them back and tell them they had the wrong guy, sometimes they'd stop for a while -- at least till that junk debt collector resold the debt to another.
It wasn't all bad. One agency had a particularly entertaining tactic: each week or so a different person would leave a message. Since it was always the same voice actor, he had to use different names with appropriate accents for each persona. My favorite was fake Scotsman Alistair McTavish.
Curiously, it seems that while people who do owe money have certain rights when dealing with collections agencies, people who don't actually owe money don't seem to have quite the same level of protection from harassment. You'd think that harassing non-debtors would be a self-limiting thing, since you (presumably) couldn't collect anything from someone without an overdue debt, but they were oddly persistent.
I am not a crackpot.
I wouldn’t worry about the Apple Mac Truck being a death trap; after all they are all very well engineered devices.
It's the other things that worry me; such as add-ons like the "Standard fuel pump to iGas adapter", "sloped driveway parking adapter", and the fact that I could only get gas, wiper blades, air freshener and other iTruck items from the approved iTruckStore. But then again ... they really do make the best adapters; and the door is on the bottom!! *mind blown*
-- sent from my S3 --
what we need now is an overzealous federal prosecutor looking to make an name for themselves and perhaps perform some act of societal penance.
won't anybody help?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Better yet, agree to the sale.
Then once they get you one the phone with the person who takes your credit card info, hang up. This will result in a cost to the call center and the agent who called you will get reprimanded for the failed conversion.
I tried this. Unfortunately, the fact that I actually wanted to talk to somebody got me bumped to some sort of "possible target" list, where I get called probably 5 times as frequently now. Before starting your strategy, I got called maybe once every few weeks. It bumped up to once or twice a day after I actually talked to somebody. *sigh*
Excellent. That means they are too busy to call me.
Everybody else do it too. You won't regret it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They would just claim it is a square with rounded corners.
Yes, and I have turned that name & number in to the DNC web site until my fingers are bleeding, fat damned lot of good its done. Now the wife is answering them playing like she is hard of hearing and going into hillbilly vernacular as soon as a human comes on the line. They hang up quickly but they keep calling backIt just encourages the bastards.
We have one of those call centers here. They made the mistake of doing a local call campaign, so I wrote it all down, and had smoke coming out of both ears when I walked into the office. Some red headed bitchj came to the counter & claimed it wasn't them, so I quoted the callerid I had written down, then quoted the number in the phone book for them. She reached under the counter as if to retrieve a weapon but found herself looking at my carry piece faster. I said, slowly and quietly, once, that if that number ever showed up on my callerid again, that I did know where there was about 50 sticks of very old Nobels, and that I knew how to use it. She took me serious. Took my phone number and purged it from the database.
That was nearly 20 years ago.
I was serious in case anybody cares.
Anything that raises their CODB gets my approval. Point is, its my telephone, and I pay the bill for it, so I should have control over what its used for. That part simply is not open for discussion. But I think Card services has changed their name, we are now being harassed at least daily by an outfit called SERVERS TDM, at 1-213-344-4839. Make of that what you will. What we really need is the home address of the owner of the scam.