Fighting Back Against Ghost Calls

An anonymous reader writes "You're doing something interesting. The phone rings. You get up, pick up the phone, and hear only silence. It could be a slasher waiting outside your house, but it's probably an errant computer at a telemarketer. This article describes how some are fighting back by setting up websites to track the worst telemarketers by their caller ids. The article mentions whocalled.us (one of the funnier urls I've ever seen), 800notes.com and numberzoom.com . One intrepid guy is even writing a program to check these sites when the call comes in before ringing the phone."

Re:Great

[arivanov]

Check the so called "Torture" dialplan for asterisk. It already does most of that. Cheers,

anonymous, unknown, blocked, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

For about half the ghost calls I get, CallerID shows some variation of anonymous, unknown, etc.

Since I have VOIP, and some VOIP providers are nefarious for not buying _all_ the CallerID lists that are available, I can't take the chance that it could my one of my children somewhere.

Of course when CallerID does show a name and/or a number then I can tell whether or not I need to pick up.

And how am I supposed to get Frost Pist if I keep getting a 404 error on the article link? ;-)

So as not to inconvenience telemarketers...

[uberdilligaff]

Most of these ghost calls arrive because the automated dial systems telemarketers use dial several calls at once, and the first one that answers gets patched to the telemarketing stooge, while others that answer a few seconds later give that spooky silence for 5-10 seconds before they are hung up. The system logs the fact that you answered. Don't worry -- they'll call back to give you some love later.

Re:in 2007

[atari2600]

What's wrong with landlines? They are still functional during a power outage (Hurricane hit spots, Windstorm frequented areas). Internet connection down and need to make a call? Oh yeah the landline (duh of course this is valid if you don't have a cellphone or bad cellphone coverage at your home and/or bad signal). DSL (although some providers provide DSL without a landline). An uh....when broadband goes down, you can still dialup. Yes this is 2007 and landlines aren't quite the proverbial floppy disk (oh wait...)

Re:My friends and I..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been done: http://www.pagerealm.com/tc2k/ [pagerealm.com]

Asterisk FTW!

[SIGBUS]

I've set up an Asterisk box on my phone line, and a nifty CGI script that lists incoming calls from the call detail record database. With one click, it can do a whocalled.us lookup on the number, and with another click, I can blacklist it. Once it's in the blacklist, when they call again, I get blessed silence, while the junk caller gets SIT tones (boop-bap-BEEP!) and a recorded message not to call again.

I can also blacklist the last caller by picking up the phone and dialing *60, if I'm not at a computer.

I've noticed that certain blocks of numbers are rather spammy, so I'll go ahead and blacklist blocks of ten or 100 numbers when I start noticing a pattern. I'm not interrupted nearly as much as I used to be.

Re:Great

[Tesen]

Don't answer the phone?

Heres how it works (or at least used)

[Anonymous Coward]

- and I don't think much has changed with this.
At the start of each shift you set up the calling list with a bunch of factors depending upon the type of script you are selling but basically it boils down to how many many numbers you are going to try for each free agent (the human who reads from the script). Say you are going to try 5 numbers for each free agent and you have 3 free agents. The auto dialer then gets grabs 15 numbers which it calls and waits for a reply. Each reply it gets routed to a free agent who then starts babbling incessantly so you can't say "STOP !!". However, if you are the 4th / 5th / 6th person to pick up then you'll get a few seconds of hold as the system scurries around looking for an agent to become free. Eventually it will time out and hang up - but don't worry, the whole event is recorded and you'll probably be called at roughly the same time another evening as you are now tagged as being a real person home at that time - lucky you !

The whole process just loops around and repeats, calls are initiated as soon as an agent becomes free etc. Though normally no-one gets called more than once per cycle, each cycle taking several days (And as soon as you actually talk to an agent you are checked off that particular list)

Re:I always thought...

[Sierpinski]

I used to work for a call center (as the DBA who handled all of the data) and you are pretty much correct about how it works. We had 40-60 callers working per any given shift, and our dialers were capable of dialing out about 120 numbers at once. There was a percentage (known/calculated statistic for this call center) of no-answer and busy signals, so they tried to tune it to be as efficient as possible. What would happen would be the 60 callers would be at their stations, and the call center computer would dial out 120 numbers. The first one that connects gets sent to the first caller (their phone rings, they pick it up and their screen is updated with that person's information), and so forth. Once all of the callers were engaged, or if too many of the people being called answered their phones at once, they were immediately disconnected. They called these 'nuisance calls' and the number of them was kept track of every night. They had a goal to stay under, and they usually made it. (I don't recall what the goal was, but it was greater than 0)

There are also two different types of dialing, one is usually called 'autodialing', where the caller is sitting there, looking at the information of the person they are about to call. They initiate the call, and are met with a standard result: Answer, no answer, busy, line dead, etc. This causes no nuisance calls, because the caller is only calling that one person.

The other kind of dialer is a predictive dialer [wikipedia.org], which dials ahead, and can cause the nuisance calls mentioned above. This is the most efficient method from a call-center point of view, because they can get through many more numbers. Lines that are no-answers, and busy never make it to the callers, so their time is spent with live calls.

Re:Great

[fbjon]

Hmmm... there goes my automated video game reservation messages, my Blockbuster overdue messages, automated messages from companies telling us our product has shipped, and any other ligitimate and useful automated phone message you might receive for appointments, etc.

Email and SMS is great, you should try it sometime!

Re:So basically...

[MikeyTheK]

You know, Grand Central from Google does the same thing. Using the "Wisdom of Crowds" theory, it allows you to use the "wisdom" to block spam calls, identify themselves before ringing your phone, etc. For a free service, it's pretty nice.

Re:Great

[RpiMatty]

Did you read his idea?
If the caller presses 1 the phone will ring.
If the caller presses 2 they can leave a voice mail.
If the caller does NOT press a button you still record what they say and save it as a voicemail.

So the only way to hear the phone ring, would be if someone called you and pressed 1. If its a computer system, you will get the voicemail.

Sounds good to me.

It's configurable (and it runs on SCO)

[eples]

Having worked (briefly) for a telemarketer, the "dialer" is a server with telcom hardware attached (ours was a SCO Unix box, ironically) and you feed it numbers to dial. Makes sense, right?

Long story short, to up your sales numbers you tell it to dial more numbers in advance. If the setting is too high, nobody's there on your end to take the call because they're all already talking to someone. The more numbers you dial the better chance someone's going to answer. There's a pacing algorithm too which takes into account the number of reps available and average call times and many other variables - but since upping the number typically gets you better sales figures... yeah you'll never guess what people do - they up the number.

There are federal regulations in place, however, specifically to limit this practice. Hard to enforce. These calls are probably not coming from a big and established telemarketer, but rather a small startup shop.