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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.
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
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.
Phone numbers get reused. I've been buying & agreeing to stuff in your name for 9 of the past 10 years.
In other news - I moved to Google Voice and it has a "press 1" feature for unknown callers - plus they have to state their name. AND it has Google Spam detection which is pretty cool.
The Telecrapper 2000 is my favorite example of how to torture telemarketers.
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
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.