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No, Your Phone Didn't Ring. So Why Voice Mail From a Telemarketer? (lifehacker.com)
Slashdot reader midwestsilentone tipped us off to a growing problem. Lifehacker reports:
New technology allows telemarketers to leave ringless voicemail messages, and it's a method that's gaining traction. While there are laws to regulate businesses when they call consumers, some groups argue that ringless voicemail shouldn't count. The New York Times reports,"ringless voicemail providers and pro-business groups...argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing"... After receiving a petition from a ringless voicemail provider, the Federal Trade Commission has started to collect public comments on this issue. So what can you do about it? First, you can head here to leave your public comment and if you're getting these voicemails, you can file a complaint with the FCC here.
Presumably that only applies if you're in the U.S. But I'd be curious to hear how many Slashdot readers have experienced this.
Presumably that only applies if you're in the U.S. But I'd be curious to hear how many Slashdot readers have experienced this.
Now the only form of communication I will check and answer is certified mail. Thanks ass hats!
considering they're probably going to allow this for politicans...and the current head of the FCC has done a wonderful job of giving the public the middle finger; letting them know he does *NOT* work for them and does not care about their opinions...even going as far as to MOCK the American Public. All you can expect from the FCC is a reply mocking you for not wanting a company to do business...no matter how much of a harassment it is.
But I'd be curious to hear how many Slashdot readers have experienced this.
Not lately nor from telemarketers. But we used to do this back in the late 90s and early 00's
Our circle of friends consisted by the vast majority of "night owls" forced to work first shift jobs.
If it was after midnight and we wanted to get a message to someone or perhaps talk on the phone, we would leave a message directly on the voicemail server without calling their phone.
If they were awake and saw the voicemail indicator, they could call back.
If they were asleep, you'd either not get a call back or get it the next day or something, but safe in the knowledge you didn't wake anyone up.
It just involved swapping carrier voicemail system numbers along with your phone number.
This was before such info was online, or at least easy to find, but you can always call in and get the number for your own voicemail server, since its entire purpose of existing was so you can check your voicemail from someone elses phone.
I am however greatly saddened to see such a useful thing abused in this way.
If they have the right to fill up my voicemail with message I don't want, I should have the same right to continually call them, tying up their phone line. Sounds fair, right?
AC comments get piped to
completely worthless
I had my cell phone carrier remove the voice mail feature from my phone. Take that suckers!
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It's adorable that you think a complaint to Trump's FCC is going to have any effect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I remember hearing very few people listen to voicemail on the phone. I know I never do. I just look at the call log and call people I know should I miss the call.
Have fun filling up my voicemail. BTW if the phone starts ringing for telemarketers or if telemarketers start texting me, into the river the phone will go.
It's always been the case that the voicemail systems for cell phones have a generic number that can be used to access the system itself (at which point the system prompts for which phone number you want to use for leaving or accessing a message). Generally there's a known mapping for region or phone prefix to VM number (e.g., an example or two) though I think at least AT&T uses one system and number for all iphones. The only thing that's new is telemarketers realizing they might be able to workaround the restrictions by using this route.
Which "technology" do they use to leave the voice mail ? I'm pretty sure we can block that in our phones.
I have turned off all voicemail.
If some sender I actually care about wants to leave a message, that is what email is for.
I don't kind of hate voicemail but I really really hate it. With my provider I can't turn it off. So I have a voicemail saying, "Don't leave a voice mail." I got rid of a phone where I couldn't turn off the voicemail notifications.
Quite simply there should be a do not bother me law. Mail, phone, voicemail, or pretty much any government regulated resource that I have should not be available for people to market their crap. That includes charities and politicians.
I don't even want warnings. I turned on the weather warning texts that my local government offered and they basically spammed me with "Be prepared" or "There is a weather warning in a place so far away that I will never ever go there, ever." messages. I turned it off a day later. So if there is an alien invasion where they have guns that fire tornadoes, I still don't want a text or voicemail.
If your phone company pretends that you have a missed call but you didn't miss any call, they're deceiving you. Simple as that.
You want to talk to me or leave me a message that is what texting is for. For telemarketers that what is the blocking/ignore function is for.
Marketeers should all die.
Tele-marketeers first of all.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yes I get these but the latest scam is hang-up-as-soon-as-you-answer, trying to get you to call back. (Establishing a business relationship with them to justify their continuing to call you or just not wasting time on any but idiots?) I get 3-6 a week, always a different out-of-area-code number. (Yes, I have the T-Mobile known-spammer block turned on.) These hang-ups are trivial for the phone company to detect and kill the number. There is no excuse for allowing them.
"argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing"
Correct, they should be classified as harassment. And since it's done over the telephone and likely come from out of state, the FBI has jurisdiction.
Spam. They discovered how to send Voicemail Spam. I can't even be mad, that's impressive.
When is this BS gonna stop? Why can't I own a phone and only hear from people I want to?
Call in a bomb threat or dial 911 they'll find you.
Call and harass THOUSANDS of people a day and its no big deal.
People still use voicemail? It's the first thing I disable at any provider. Call me again if it was important.
The telcos will charge the spammers for direct access to voicemail and will offer consumers a service (at additional cost) that will block voicemails from spammers.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I see a list of voicemails. The police types come from a D.C. Area code. Ergo all VMs from D.C. Get trashed
If I'm reading this (a 'petition' filed with the FCC) correctly, commenting expired a week ago: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub... However, the link in the original post shows new comments.
Has anyone figured out if it's possible to add a comment? If so, what are you using for the "proceedings" field here:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filin...
I recorded the out of service SIT tone (the three rising beeps that you hear when you dial an out of service phone number) as the first thing on my outbound voicemail message. So my outbound message is "beep beep beep Hello this is me etc. etc.")
Most robodialers are programmed to hang up and remove the number from their dialing lists when they hear those three beeps.
Real people can still leave you a message, but it works amazingly well to keep spammers off of your voicemail.
You can download the sit tone from several places; just run the phrase "sit tone" through google and you'll find it.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
This provides an excellent excuse for anyone wanting to free themselves from the pestilence of voicemail.
For those of us who use pay-as-you-go cell phones, (even if this does not ring the phone) if I have to pay to receive it, it needs to be illegal.
My cell provider seems to have reduced the number of vocemails that I am allowed to store. I have deleted 15 messages, and it is still full.
If I want more space, I need to pay more.
So, this will keep my voicemail full, no matter how many times I buy more voicemail slots.
My family, coworkers, customers, suppliers will not be able to leave messages if I can' answer the phone just then. Great...
This is a boon to the voicemail services who will rake in more cash for more space, but the consumer will only have downsides to this.
put down 1-215-739-8255 as your number! and then they will get billed.
At least we know who to thank: http://straticsnetworks.com/ri...
I got pay as you go from Rogers. Voicemail counts as a completed call under pay per minute so I deliberately didn't set up voicemail. I pay $5 per month for 250 texts, all calls are 50 cents per minute. Needless to say I don't call or answer the phone much. This system would cost me large.
>"While there are laws to regulate businesses when they call consumers, some groups argue that ringless voicemail shouldn't count.
Are you kidding me? Voicemail is even MORE annoying than calls. I will get pestered by repeating notifications and have to stop what I am doing and "log into" it just to delete them. So instead of a few second annoyance, this equates to a many seconds annoyance.
I am already pissed that I have no way of rejecting a call AND that rejects their ability to leave a voicemail (I would actually prefer it send them to an announcement-only that says something like "your call is rejected, please remove this number from any and all lists"). And in Android, Google is trying to be so helpful by labeling those incoming calls as "SPAM" and yet there is no setting to have it automatically BLOCK such calls.
Consumers have woefully little control on who annoys us. Why should we weaken what little control there already is?
Why does telemarketing even exist today? I don't think that I have received a single telemarketing call since the 90's that wasn't obviously a scam of some kind. Refinance my house though a company that no one has ever heard of, pump-n-dump stock schemes, make certain of my body parts larger, reduce my taxes I legally owe, I am a Nigerian prince ...
Man will only be free, once the last priest has been hanged with the entrails of the last telemarketer...
Set your voice message to be, "This is Bob M's voice mail. The fee for leaving telemarketing calls is $1,000 per second of message. Leaving a message indicates acceptance of these terms. Have a great day."
Now I know who the really bad companies are and will never do business with them. Seriously, this won't last long due to backlash.
...I'm rather glad we don't have to deal with the FCC. I don't get telemarketing on my mobile and I certainly don't use voicemail, although whenever I change SIM my provider thoughtfully makes it the default option, swiftly disabled. The first thing I do after disabling it is to reset my voicemail number to my home - which has built-in storage for a lot more messages than my mobile service could handle. My wife's phone does the same - number of telemarketing messages received in the last 10 years or so = NONE. I'm quite happy with that and will remain happy unless some asshole goes and changes the system. If that happens, I'll be looking into how number spoofing works and dealing with the spammers accordingly.
After thinking about it, I just don't see a way for someone to place a call to your phone number and have it automatically routed to your telephone provider's voicemail without your telephone provider's cooperation.
When an incoming call is routed to your telephone provider, your telephone provider is going to ring your phone, and will not connect the call to your voice mail unless the phone rejects the call (for cell calls), or the phone rings for a prescribed period of time.
This kind of harassment requires your telephone provider's cooperation. Where this is going, is that if this practice is blessed by FCCs, the telemarketers will offer money to telephone providers to allow them to call directly their customers' voicemails.
This needs to be publicized: should this actually happen, and one finds themselves on the receiving end of voicemail spam: complain to your telephone provider. If they play stupid, and they refuse to block the voicespam, fire them, and make sure explain to them why you are firing them.
Telemarketers, at least the ones willing to break the law by calling people on the Do Not Call list, typically spoof caller ID, making it useless for return-call spamming. Sometimes, the spoofed number belongs to some innocent, unsuspecting third party, as with the "lower your electric bill!" scammer who called me a couple of hours ago. So at best, return call spamming would be useless and at worst you'd be harassing some innocent victim who got joe-jobbed.
I hate this idea, but it is probably going to happen considering the government we have right now.
But if it's gonna happen, I'd like them to fix what is working against us with the caller ID system--spoofing.
Telemarketers use a bogus Caller ID number (on top of calling me despite my repeated requests of "remove me your list" and "Do not call me". It's a joke and the law has no teeth. How about the systems that enable them to do this be set up to only work for registered businesses that registered and verified all of their information, including the callback number on the voicemail match a legitimate customer service number for the company. The TELCO's will charge them up the ying-yang for this "convenient service" which gives them this type of access. The cost needs to be high to keep companies from registering dummy accounts and just skipping on to the next dummy corporation to keep ahead of the authorities.
The company needs to provide legit CID number where the voicemail was transmitted. This will also serve as a callback number if they want to sign up for it, but also as something they can add to a personal blacklist. Anytime I get a call from a telemarketer on my cell phone, I add the number to a contact with does not ring or vibrate (a silent MP3 is still a ringtone), so I never have to deal with this again.
Maybe, the phone company (or cell phone/phone app) can launch a service a voicemail spam filter on all numbers flagged by their customers X number of times get blacklisted. They could make a few bucks to get this working (until a free version comes along).
If we get the right features in place while the put this service is, we can have the pieces of the puzzle in place to ignore all of it, later on.
This also mean it is perfectly legal to put a bag of dogpoop on a telemarketers porch if you do not ring the door bell. But you can not put it on fire, and therefore you can omit the paper bag.
the Federal Trade Commission has started to collect public comments on this issue
Sure, because this thorny problem is likely to generate many conflicting opinions. For example, there will be those who adamantly oppose voice mail spamming. Then, there will be those who instead express disgust and outrage at the prospect of voice mail spamming. Those opinions will be countered by yet others who will choose to say that voice mail spamming is merely a gross abuse of private resources. Oh, yes, and then, there will be the dead people, the bots and the spammers themselves.
It doesn’t matter that in 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (signed by President George H. W. Bush), reinforced in 2005 by the Junk Fax Prevention Act, had outlawed junk faxes, which are essentially the same thing as junk voice mail, only differing in the medium used (printed page versus computer memory). Noooooo, this is clearly all different, and we obviously need a national reflection on this delicate and quite novel topic.
Because, you never know... We may well find that the prevailing majority of opinions came from the bots.
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
NT$
Telemarketers cannot lawfully call mobile phones.
Yet I get unsolicited telemarketer texts almost monthly.
So now they've found a slimy way to leave voicemail too?
I hope they get shut down entirely: simply change the law to say they cannot “contact” mobile phones. Period.
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
It counts as an invasive practice. Everything that pollutes personal streams of communication should be banned. I use email and phone to conduct necessary communications. When you guys add your spam you waste my time. Now, if you were to give me a strip of latinum each time you did that... I might change my opinion, but then again you might not afford it - so either way I'm OK with it.
Will not only ignore your comments but their spam bots will post 100 for ever 1 comment you leave. In fact, they will also likely use this technique in the next propaganda campaign for old orange head
There's lots of pro-Trump folks on /., especially when they were staring down the barrel of a Hilary presidency. Sony Music CD DRM is more popular on /. than Hilary was/is.
But all the folks seem to go missing whenever a story about privacy or Net Neutrality crops up. Yeah, yeah, I know. You can agree with Trump on some things and disagree with him on others. All I'm saying is, you made this bed, dragged the rest of us into it. Now you're damn well gonna sleep in it too. And I'll be damned if you're gonna lie there and pretend you're not getting eaten alive by bed bugs.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
this could be used to leave ring-less voice-mail drops for politicians.. just saying.
from what i see this is the only way to get a politicians attention, use the tools they grant for companies against the politicians. Best case scenario, they fix the problem. If they come out with some law saying that it can only be used by corporations then just incorporate yourself and continue on.
You can let google handle your voicemail for you and then you can manage them like emails in your inbox. I don't like the idea of google sifting through all of my voice communications, but better than me having to sift through them.
Something literally nobody wants has GOP cheerleading anyway.
Whoever makes it legal to shoot these bastards on sight has my vote!
Go get it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I haven't listened to my voice mail in at least 5 years. No point when people tend to text or email shit anyways.
Be seeing you...
Ajit will go with which ever side puts more money into his pocket, no questions asked. then tell the otherside, usually the people he is supposed to be serving, to go fuck ourselves.
I checked my phone and I had voicemail. Confused and wondering how on earth someone did that I checked and it was a call about student loans that I have and how I can improve my savings. Weird because I never had a student loan.
Let's really call what ringless voicemail are. Another revenue stream for the Telcos. They could easily end that service. Start there first and fix the problem at the source.
I wished there was a to disable Google Voice's VM. My number isn't tied to any phones too. I asked and was told there wasn't a way.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What about answer machines? Can they still do that too?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I s a lessen advertisers should learn. In the early days of TV 12 minutes per hour now its 18-20, in Newspapers decent comprehensive article with a few ads is replaced now with a page of ads with click bait headline. translated to the web, even articles are often nothing more than advertising, I remember when the telemarketer call was rare and they offered something in return and a few weeks later a small free gift would arrive in the mail. Even Billboards now not only everywhere but distracting moving pictures. This is either making us immune or looking for ways to block or avoid them. Adblockers, downloading shows etc all to avoid the overload of ads
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Everyone involved with this, from the top down, needs to see their loved ones dragged out into the street and put to the torch, while they themselves are on the wheel.
There is no other way to fix any of this. Angry phonecalls "are taken very seriously" and things only get worse instead. Electing someone that promises to fix it puts someone in power that makes things worse instead. Trying to vote with our wallets simply causes mergers and further cartel collusion and things get worse again.
The ONLY way these atrocities are going to stop is if those who would want to perform them have it made it extremely clear to them that the only thing they'll get out of it is a painful end for themselves and everything they've ever loved. Then, maybe, just maybe, we'll get some peace and quiet.
If you're going to take my submission, completely rewrite it with credit to someone else and show at it as "midwestsilentone tipped us off", don't bother mentioning me, its not my submission.
While this lets us know after the fact, comments on it appear to have been due by 18 May.
Like most part of government, word of these slimeball proposals don't get out to the public when there is enough time to act on them.
What is it a "voice-mail?" That archaic technology overcamed long time ago by IMs? By recorded messages to WhatsApp and other IMs? Oh that one! Haven't activated any of it in 15 years. Mainly due to lengthy set-up for unnecessary services, like a password protected voice-mail. Blah! The time spent on it equals to at least 20 voice messages via IMs and VoIPs.
This could be an interesting move to just let spammers use voicemail that nobody listens to, as a kind of a spam trap.
It might not work in USA, where voicemal is still surprisingly popular. In Europe and Asia especially introduction of GSM has killed voicemail for private use - most people (over 50%, depending on country/study) do not enable it or if it was enabled by default just never bother listening to messages (some have a greeting that says "This is XX voicemail that will never get listened to, please send SMS"). I can't remember when I've last heard anybody say "Hi, please call me back when you hear this message" or similar - except as for a dramatic effect in USA movies/series. ..."), even if it still has cultural (and probably legal, like fax) implications in some countries. It's so much simpler and more convenient to use SMS.
Voicemail is too linear and too slow for modern times, just wasting your time ("please press zero to return to main menu, please press seven to
On the other hand it's not a good idea to cede anything to the spammers.
anyone happen to know/find out the mobile number for the FCC chairperson? for sure, local politician's voice mailbox is public knowledge. bet if your local politician and the FCC chairperson's vbox filled silently from thousands of our concerned calls for a month, they would quickly realize the downside to allowing this crap to happen. #bethevictim
...by draining the swamp.
Used to be you had to pay a lobbyist, who then bought a Congresscritter, who then forced a regulation down the throat of the appropriate federal agency.
With the new-and-improved swamp version Trump.0, the corporations can skip the middle-men and just dictate terms directly to the appropriate federal agencies.
#maga
The last time I called my VM I can't remember. When I miss a call, I call the person back if I know them. If private number then they can fuck the right off.
Why is this even allowed? Who else could it benefit but THEM? How do they get away with it? Are they bribing the FCC?
Oh how generous of the FCC to allow for public comments on this issue, when they deem astroturf comments to be as legitimate as actual human comments.
First don't set up the voice mail on your number. Then use your computer to record messages that wait for a response from voicemail with one of these...
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2687