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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.
By definition, a robocaller cannot be driven insane. That would only happen to humans. Also, this is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Why hasn't the Do Not Call list worked? Seems there was too many loop holes and ways around the law I guess.
I see he has a Kickstarter going for a commercial version. Problem is that as soon as more than one person has it, the callers will learn to recognize the voice in the first few seconds. In fact they will train their computers to recognize the voice and not even put it through to a human being, so really it's no better than just hanging up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oh, I don't know ... wasting their resources and annoying the hell out of them if you can sounds way cooler.
So much telemarketing is just spam these days, and the companies who rely on it bought exemptions so the same people in the same call centers could call us with both "real" bullshit as well as the fully scam bullshit. Between that and the laundry list of exemptions, it's not like do not call lists work.
If you can fuck up the business model and tie up their resources, maybe that will help get rid of more of it. And, really, where I live I have apparently called myself on numerous occasions with spam calls, despite me telling myself to stop doing that.
I doubt your caller id blocker can fix the problem of carefully crafted fake caller ID which looks like a local call.
What needs to happen is stop the stupid exemption for fake caller ID to allow corporations to use those call centers in the first place. If you don't have a real, verifiable caller ID, your call gets dropped in the system.
I don't care if your business model is having someone call me from Bangladesh ... not my fucking problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I haven't had a landline in about 10 years, but I hand out my last landline phone number to anyone who asks for a phone number - let them waste time calling a dead line. Only real people that I know and trust get my cell number, and the are entered as contacts. Any call from someone in my address book pops up with their name, so I know it's safe to answer. If it is a call with no address in my phone, I don't answer. If they leave a message, I see if it is junk or if it is a legit communication. If legit, I add it as a contact and respond.
I very occasionally will get a robocall from a random dialer, but the above procedure kills the problem in the nest.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Neither can criminals. What's your point? They know full well they're lying to you.
Um, no. I'll hate on the people making the calls too. Sprint Telemarkers are legal, so it isn't a problem. They don't call me. The ones that call me when I am on the do not call list are not legal. They are doing illegal things, and they know it, and they don't care. Sociopathic. There are plenty of ways to make money without doing illegal things.
"Hating on the people making the calls is wrong..." Opinion. Not shared by all. Also, hating the others on your list is not a mutually exclusive activity.
Absolutely no one is unaware that telecallers are a hated species. Don't take that job if you can't handle the hate.
Simply set your answering machine to pick up in one ring.
Set the answer to: "Hello..." Pause for about 7 seconds then "I'm sorry we're not interested, please remove us from your call list."
We went from about 8 calls a day between 8am and 10pm to roughly 2 calls a week (most IRS scammers)
Sure, most people really despise the robocalls, but wasting the caller's time doesn't really help much, either. Just like with spammers, the robo-callers are being paid to do a job - and believe it or not annoying you is not what they are paid for.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
says the person who is not going hungry and has a roof over his head.
Yep, some people are judgemental assholes. I know that, I don't need reminding.
Yep, feel the hate. I know, its fun to hate people. Just hope you never get in a bind and have to make choices between your beliefs and getting fed.
I met people with the same basic attitude in college. Privileged little kids who never met the real world and would go on at length judging other people. Just makes me sad.
So much telemarketing is just scam these days
TFTFY
Most of them seem to be trying to get me to donate to their political campaign or charity, which after further research, doesn't exist.
Nowadays I think I'd rather donate to a political party that doesn't exist than to one that does..
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
We're talking about telemarketers here. If you can physically harm them over the phone line... it might delay the next call. Totally worth it.
If no innocents are being killed, I say fire at will, stake those vampires!
They have no right to call you, you merely don't have methods to stop them. Often they're calling in violation of the law, and if they harm themselves doing it, well they should buy telephones that don't harm them. Blaming their victim for screaming too loudly is pathetic; it is their telephone manufacturer who has a duty to make a safe device, not the person they call with it.
But this does answer, and it answers with "Hello? Hello? Hello?!?!" if that doesn't get you transferred to a live agent, the dialer is a failure.
These days a lot of autodialers ARE failures. If you actually answer it, about half the time it either hangs up on you or there is nothing there but silence and you eventually get tired of saying "hello" and hang up.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
. There are some very legitimate reasons for this such as: Changing your call back number to a toll-free number, and maintaining the original calling number on forwarded calls.
It should be pretty trivial to develop a system where the carrier can verify that the spoofed ID is in fact a legitimate number tied to the calling organization.
It should be even more trivial to develop a system where the callerid spoofed on my handset can be reported to the carrier, with the time of the call, and they can immediately determine where the call REALLY came from, and report that to me, to the police... to whomever.