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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.
To really piss off telemarketers, the robot should give itself away after a few minutes by saying "this has been a recording. Have a nice day." In this sample call, the telemarketer just eventually hung up, thinking he was talking to a person who just had too much time on their hands. I think the reaction would have been better had he known he had been duped by a machine.
I knew someone who worked at Sprint's telemarketing center in Georgia. Stress is high, pay is low, and, naturally, turnover is high. People don't tend to stay at those places long, but if you haven't been able to get other work it can help pay bills until you can.
Hating on the people making the calls is wrong, hate the companies who pay the telecoms to do it for them. Hate the telecoms for double dipping (taking money for a number to be unlisted, then taking money to provide lists that include unlisted numbers, then taking money for a number to be unpublished, etc.). Hate on the companies that use robocallers that spoof the source.
But please realize that not everyone can have a desirable job.
I had a friend who made "mass marketing email software". SPAM software. he knew people hated the emails, but needed the cash.
I knew someone who was a pickpocket on the subway. He knew people hated losing their wallets, but he needed the cash.
I'm on the do-not-call list, so the call is illegal. If the 'product' or 'service' is fraudulent, then the call is illegal. If the call is a robocall, then it is illegal (with few exceptions).
If you want to learn the true character of the people calling you, make a click on the line so it sounds like you hung up. After they have heaped abuse upon you (thinking you can't hear them), ask them to repeat it and listen to them swallowing their own tongue as they hang up.
The point is to get through to a person though, and then waste their time. Listen to the video in TFA. The bot will ask the caller if they are a person, and if the caller does not stop to consider the question then the bot will press 1 a few times to get through to a person, and then proceeds to waste that person's time. In other words, the bot does exactly what a robocall bot does, tries to reach a person then wastes their time.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I strung him along by responding literally to his questions while using a handy FreeBSD server I had sitting there under the table until he gave me their logmein url(which I later reported to logmein support, who promised to close their account), then allowed him to finally make sense of my somewhat responses (I don't see a Start button, but I do have a window I can type that command in... What version am I using? The OS says version 10, etc...) when I finally asked him what kind of computer engineer has never heard of FreeBSD before...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Of course you are having an effect. When you keep the asshole busy on the line the asshole that pays him gets nothing for his money. When you hangup you just free him to interrupt someone else's dinner.
At least say, 'hang on, there is someone at the door' and put the phone down. Hang it up 15 minutes later.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Years ago, I had problems with a FAX spammer who would send junk every night. We had to leave it on overnight because it was a transport company and we would receive bills of lading at all hours. This also meant, however, that we had a separate phone line for voice calls, which did *not* need to be left free all night.
Anyhow, all of these faxes had a removal number to call, which made you jump through all sorts of hoops. I noticed shortly after attempting it that it actually *increased* the volume of spam to TWO a night. The "removal" number was, however, toll-free. This gave me an idea.
I listened and noted the timing of prompts, and the associated menu options, for the "removal" service. I brought in an old modem from home, and set it up to autodial their number (on their dime) and start "removal" processes. This I did in two different ways:
(1) First my modem would call them and demand removal of a number. They were so helpful and asked if I wished to remove another, so of course my modem would say YES, and proceed to "remove" the next number in sequence. It would cycle through all 1000 numbers in a block before disconnecting, and each time it did this, it incremented the number of the block being removed (except for invalid ones like 555). This took about four hours, all of which they had to pay the charges for. Not long after (and possibly as a direct consequence), they started limiting the calls to three numbers before hanging up.
(2) My second iteration of the program would select a random number, go through the "removal" steps, but then when asked "are you sure?" it would hit the button for "NO", at which point the process would start again. It would pick a new random number and do this again and again. If the call was terminated, it waited five minutes and called again. Since it never completed the process, the three-number limit did not apply. I think this worked for three or four days before they implemented a fifteen minute cutoff regardless of what you were doing at the time. I didn't re-program for this at all, I just tolerated the 25% loss of efficiency at driving up heir phone bill and let it call back five minutes after being disconnected.
Finally I got an angry call, during business hours, demanding that I stop doing this. I flat out said "sue me." The person at the other end finally said "why would you want me to do that?", to which I responded "because then I'll know exactly who you are, and can sue you for each of the hundreds of faxes you have sent, which I have been keeping as evidence." He coughed and said "Look, just stop calling us, eh? Nobody else can call when you're doing this." (Did I mention they were in Vancouver?) I just said "I will cease the calls as long as you do."
We got another one two weeks later, but I could only run the auto-dialer at night, so I couldn't do anything right at that moment. I got a VOICE call fifteen minutes later telling me to please disregard and not start the remove-bot again. That was the last time I heard from them.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.