When Telemarketers Harass Telecoms Companies 234
farnz writes "Andrews & Arnold, a small telecoms company in the UK, have recently been hit with an outbreak of illegal junk calls. Unlike larger firms, they've come up with an innovative response — assign 4 million numbers to play recordings to the telemarketers, put them on the UK's Do-Not-Call list and see what happens. Thus far, the record is over 3 minutes before a telemarketer works out what's going on." The sound quality (and the satisfying humor) of the recording gets better as it goes on.
genetic algorithms (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm... permutations of random interactions and voice prompting plugged into a genetic algorithm. Best series of responses wins.
Epic.
Fun for AI, eh? (Score:3, Funny)
I find it interesting that this is another, alternative, way that spam encourages the development of AI --- just think of the fun of having a reply-bot which could string these guys out for as long as the bot passes the Turing test!
Man in the Middle (Score:5, Funny)
2. Put them on the phone with each other.
3. ???
4. Hilarity ensues.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Funny)
We need a port of ELIZA [wikipedia.org] to a robust voice-recognition platform with text-to-speech of the responses :)
Re:Do Not Call lists really help TM companies (Score:3, Funny)
Dunno about the US one, but the objection UK telemarketers usually have to it is that it is kind-of expensive. My company used to do telemarketing as follow-ons from our (business-to-business) mailshots, but access to the TPS database costs about £5,000 per annum, which was hard to justify for us: our turnover was only about £30,000 at the time so it would have become our single largest expense and thus sunk a huge chunk of our profits. We therefore had to stop doing marketing calls.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fun for AI, eh? (Score:3, Funny)
I think a bot has a better chance of passing a Turing test than a telemarketer.
Re:Man in the Middle (Score:3, Funny)
Scott Mills (a BBC DJ) did this with 2 Chinese take aways. It was very funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s16eFSe1OFI [youtube.com]
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Funny)
I was told I was eligible for a loan, and I thanked them profusely for it. I explained that I was a bankrupt, and that his message to me was such welcome news.
He kept asking how much my wife earned - I explained I didn't know as she kept that from me, but I didn't think her disposable income was high because she had to support my son's drug habit. Managed to spin that one out for quite a while.
Another time I annoyed the telemarketer so much that after he hung up on me he rang back to abuse me.
This http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html [xs4all.nl] is also fun to follow.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:3, Funny)
We prefer the term flatulist [wikipedia.org]. But alas, with the passing of Joseph Pujol's [wikipedia.org] gas-passing, the golden age of flatulence is gone. YouTube fart lighters [youtube.com] are at best a distant bronze. The more distant the better.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Funny)