Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Neither will the system in the summary. The advanced call blockers do everything stated in the summary with the exception of the last sentence, they don't jabber or press buttons randomly.
They operate in two modes, whitelist only smart mode and white/black list or training mode. In the training mode everything rings through except black listed numbers. You manually indicate white or black list status to the device for a few weeks for incoming calls. Then, once you have built a whitelist database up, you put it in smart mode. That only allows whitelist calls through, and anything else gets answered with a prompt to be put through if you are a human caller.
Rejected calls and "no caller ID", "anonymous" and "unknown" are all automatically blocked. I have one and I'm very happy with it, and no I don't work for either a manufacturer of them or Amazon.
Although it doesn't maximize the time-wasting aspect of annoying the incoming callers, it at least answers and hangs up on them, so it costs them their dime.
Anyway, most telemarketers use Entropy mass dialers that call 10 numbers at a time and only transfer the one that answers to a live agent, so 9 out of 10 times you're bot is only hassling another bot.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --