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.
Why hasn't the Do Not Call list worked? Seems there was too many loop holes and ways around the law I guess.
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.
You do realize that someone else has been assigned that number in the 10 years since you last used it, right? It's not a dead line if some other poor schmuck (your true victim) has to answer your calls.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.