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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... --
You can't drive robocallers insane... they're already there!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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
I love listening to the itslenny calls.... https://www.reddit.com/r/itsle...
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
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 fuck with telemarketers mercilessly, waste their time, and generally ruin their day until they hang up. :)
I also have a list of test questions that I make them answer before I let them proceed. Some are legit questions (how deep is the Mariana Trench?) and some are trick questions.
Question: If I have 10 apples and you take 5, what do you have?
They always say "5"....
My answer: No, you have two broken arms, because NO ONE takes my fucking apples!
I love running them ragged and by the time they hang up in frustration (or if they fail 3 questions) they realize that they suck and should seek honest employment.
Sometimes I make an "appointment" with them, but I give them a bogus address. Sometimes I give them my actual address and just play dumb when they show up a day or two later. It quickly becomes a lose-lose situation for companies to hire these telemarketers and they don't re-hire them, lol. :)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
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!
Simply switching off the ringer on my landline has had the same effect; after tailing off over the first 6 months or so, I rarely get telemarketing calls anymore (as in, not even once a month). Anyone who really wants to reach me will leave me voicemail. Messages from those few telemarketers who don't hang up get deleted on recognition within the first couple of seconds of playback. And anyone who really needs to reach me directly will have been given my cell number to do so. Works admirably.
licet differant, aequabitur
No but this is effectively a tar pit for their bot.
While it's busy, it can't harm other people.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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)
They are just trying to make a living.
So do burglars. Doesn't mean I have to support it. Actually, any second of their lifetime wasted by a machine without them being able to make the life of another person miserable or waste another person's time is a second won.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Jennifer was SO TIRED of harassing telemarketing calls until she learned this one old telephone trick! Now Shes making them wish they never called!
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
The Telecrapper 2000 is my favorite example of how to torture telemarketers.
Sounds like a reimplementation of the telecrapper.
tho the telecrapper is over 10 years old now I can understand how people would forget..
http://www.engadget.com/2005/0...
http://myplace.frontier.com/~p...
http://soundbytes.org/forums/t...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
And that has fixed things so well that we need this gadget.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
Listened to some of the recordings, very cool. I can just imagine when the logic in this gets better. Like when they ask 'Who....?' 'Which....?' 'What....?'
The bot doesn't do any answers for that, just go 'mm-mmm' 'right' 'ok'. Same with 'How are you'.
But these are fantastic, I'd love to enter voice into this.
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
or just forward the call to the FCC if they have an 800 number
Nullius in verba
I've been thinking about running my own in-home PBX to deal with this, too.
Whitelisted numbers, friends, family, and businesses I want to talk to: Rings right through.
Numbers not on the whitelist: straight to voicemail, my phone does not ring, not even once. The voicemail says, "Hello?" a few times to see if anyone answers, then says "This is a recording, please leave a message" in order to (presumably) get the robo-calls routed to an actual agent.
Numbers on the blacklist: Forwarded to Lenny, or something very special I program myself. (I don't like that "Lenny" says "Yeah" and similar positive type words from time to time; those crooks might claim that was an agreement to get a subscription to The Wisdum of L. Ron Hubbard crammed onto my phone bill.) My ideal would be to sound perfectly normal, do some interpretation of what they're saying to actually address things they say, and do a "curious about the product but not agreeing to anything" act for as long as they stay on the phone.
On the top of the blacklist are those evil <redacted> who call six times simultaneously, so the phone rings a whole lot longer than normal before going to voicemail, and the Caller-ID announces their name six times. Bastards. This is the sort of thing that makes me yearn for the "Scanners" power to reach down the phone line telekinetically and set their computer on fire.
Bonus, custom voicemail messages for appropriate callers, white/non/blacklisted. Like "Hi, Mom, we're not home, call my cell."
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.
This is criminal activity. If the federal government wanted to stop this they CAN trace a call, follow it back to the U.S. call center or credit card billing number. How? Find 100 people willing to have a tap on the phone; tell them to agree to anything and pay with a government credit card they are given; trace the credit card info and land on the U.S. part of the operation HARD using the conspiracy laws.
If you don't think they have the ability to do that do the following though experiment: How fast would it take for the police to arrive at your door if the robo call was saying "I think we should bomb the White House with confetti using toy drones. Would you like to buy one set up to use? If so, press one.
If any of the people running for President made it a campaign promise to shut these people down I'd vote for him or her at the March 1st Texas primary