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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.
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 love listening to the itslenny calls.... https://www.reddit.com/r/itsle...
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
"Have your robot call my robot."
Dark Reflection
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.
Neither will the system in the summary. The advanced call blockers do everything stated in the summary with the exception of the last sentence, they don't jabber or press buttons randomly.
They operate in two modes, whitelist only smart mode and white/black list or training mode. In the training mode everything rings through except black listed numbers. You manually indicate white or black list status to the device for a few weeks for incoming calls. Then, once you have built a whitelist database up, you put it in smart mode. That only allows whitelist calls through, and anything else gets answered with a prompt to be put through if you are a human caller.
Rejected calls and "no caller ID", "anonymous" and "unknown" are all automatically blocked. I have one and I'm very happy with it, and no I don't work for either a manufacturer of them or Amazon.
Although it doesn't maximize the time-wasting aspect of annoying the incoming callers, it at least answers and hangs up on them, so it costs them their dime.
Anyway, most telemarketers use Entropy mass dialers that call 10 numbers at a time and only transfer the one that answers to a live agent, so 9 out of 10 times you're bot is only hassling another bot.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
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.
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.
Yeah - I have 2 that I play. My time is valuable (to me) so I make it short - but I like to make them uncomfortable.
Old married couple who can't hear what the person is saying. They keep talking angrily back and forth "if you put your hearing aid in like I said" "shut up woman" "you old sob - I should have listened to my mother" "I don't have a good grip - don't drop it" [drop phone] [click]
When the Windows Tech Support people call I use this one:
[Dad voice] "I have a virus on my computer again? hold on - I told my kid to stop messing with the computer. Son!! Get your ass down here now. How many times have I told you... why you S-O-B... I'm going to beat you"
[whack some object for effect]
[child voice] "Ow Dad, ow ow I'll be good. [waah] stop it please stop it"
[Dad voice] "Here - you talk to this mother-f'r and fix the goddamn computer. We're going to have a looong conversation when this is over"