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How One Small Company Blocked 15.1 Million Robocalls Last Year
TechCurmudgeon sends this excerpt from an article at Wired:
Aaron Foss won a $25,000 cash prize from the Federal Trade Commission for figuring out how eliminate all those annoying robocalls that dial into your phone from a world of sleazy marketers. ... Using a little telephone hackery, Foss found a way of blocking spammers while still allowing the emergency alert service and other legitimate entities to call in bulk. Basically, he re-routed all calls through a service that would check them against a whitelist of legitimate operations and a blacklist of spammers, and this little trick was so effective, he soon parlayed it into a modest business. Last year, his service, called Nomorobo, blocked 15.1 million robocalls.
His last name is "Foss" ("free and open source").
Pretty great joke, I never would have noticed the name.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
There are plenty ways to implement screening yourself, https://www.wrbishop.com/telecom/end-robocaller-solicitation-and-hangup-calls-with-asterisk/ has a from scratch way. There are many of these asterisk callscripts available, from simply always playing a no sollicitors message and needing a keypress from the caller to, white/blacklists and greylisting unknowns by having them enter a message and have you decide what to do with calls (accept once, whitelist/blacklist/ignore/terminate)
As usual, the service is the maintenance of the black-/whitelists. You can DIY, but then you lack the economies of scale and it's not worth it.
I sure hope his hack is free/open-source.
He's using Twilio. Twilio is not free for him (with the amount of phone traffic he's generating). Somebody has to pay for the service, whether the customer ultimately ends up paying for it, or the service is being monetized by advertisements, or a phone company decides to pay for the service as a value-added service that they pass to their own customers. The source code itself is nothing special. The idea itself isn't even new. This guy just happened to have entered a contest/hackathon sponsored by the FTC.
For white listing phone calls, google voice (integrated with Sprint) is actually pretty good. If you're looking to combine both white listing and shared black listing at the same time, there are many other startups that are offering that kind of service as well. With cloud services like Twilio or Voxeo, it's fairly easy for just one developer, or a small startup, to get into the telephony business.