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A Bot That Drives Robocallers Insane
Trailrunner7 writes: Robocalls are among the more annoying modern inventions, and consumers and businesses have tried just about every strategy for defeating them over the years, with little success. But one man has come up with a bot of his own that sends robocallers into a maddening hall of mirrors designed to frustrate them into surrender. The bot is called the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, and it's the work of Roger Anderson, a veteran of the phone industry himself who had grown tired of the repeated harassment from telemarketers and robocallers. Anderson started out by building a system that sat in front of his home landlines and would tell human callers to press a key to ring through to his actual phone line; robocallers were routed directly to an answering system. He would then white-list the numbers of humans who got through. Sometimes the Jolly Roger bot will press buttons to be transferred to a human agent and other times it will just talk back if a human is on the other end of the line to begin with.
You can buy one of these for $50.00 from Amazon, and they have been around for a few years. Not so amazing...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
When I was unemployed for two years (2009-2010), and getting ready to file for chapter seven bankruptcy in 2011, the credit card companies sold my debts to the debt collecting agencies. Most debt collectors were disappointed to find a note in the file that I was filing for bankruptcy and left it at that. A few weren't so polite. One debt collector kept hanging up on me when I demanded that he acknowledged the note in the file. I called five times in five minutes, tying up his phone during that time, before he gave me what I wanted.
Phone numbers get reused. I've been buying & agreeing to stuff in your name for 9 of the past 10 years.
In other news - I moved to Google Voice and it has a "press 1" feature for unknown callers - plus they have to state their name. AND it has Google Spam detection which is pretty cool.
The Telecrapper 2000 is my favorite example of how to torture telemarketers.
wasting the caller's time doesn't really help much, either. ... and believe it or not annoying you is not what they are paid for.
Umm, exactly. They're being paid to sell you some worthless thing or another. Their success rate is low, so the way they make their profits is by pitching the largest number of people in the shortest period of time. It's a numbers game. Telemarketers don't pay retail rates, but they do have to pay for phoneline time, outgoing connections, equipment, staff, etc. They do it because they can sucker a small fraction of callees into paying. That low response rate makes up for the operating costs.
If you can somehow raise their operating costs, or drop their success rate, the cost/benefit analysis starts to tip in the direction of unprofitability, and they'll stop calling people. Waste the callers time, and you've tipped things towards being less cost effective. Tie up their lines, and they can't make additional outgoing calls. If enough people did it, there wouldn't be a reason to do it.