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.
There is an app for that. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish someone would write an app were you can press a button on the phone and hang up and a smart adaptive talking application takes over and provides selective responses such as "can you repeat that bit again" or "right, tell me more" or "cool sign me up" and massively wastes these evil telemarketers time.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:5, Informative)
There is an app for this and it's called Asterisk.
You can also do this with sipgate via Asterisk on any cell phone if you publish a sipgate number and route through to your cell and configure Asterisk do the filtering, which it can also intercept a whitelist/blacklist caller and then start playing games with them.
The cheap way of doing this is to let Google Voice be your answering machine, and change your voice message to "Hello? (4 second pause) Oh I'm sorry I'm not here." That is enough to trick most autodialers into routing your voicemail to a live operator, who then has the option of revealing who they are or hanging up and calling again. I don't accept blocked/800/877 and Unavailable caller ID. At least with Google Voice's translate feature I can bulk delete most of the crap voicemails without listening to them and if I did dump a call to VMX that was a legit caller I can read their voicemail and return it.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a captcha on my asterisk.
Someone dials me and i greet them with, press 1 if you want to talk to us. Telemarketers dialing machines dials a number, waits for an answer and then connects it to a free agent. This message is lost to them. If you haven't pressed 1 you are in an infinite loop.
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Maybe one day they'll have voice recognition and press 1.
Of course, you could always ask for pi to 100 digits....
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A computer would be more able to play back pi to a hundred digits than a human. But I'd like to see a computer try to solve:
Press only the key corresponding to the nth letter of the word "[dynamically selected word here]" where n is the number of letters in "[other dynamically selected word here]". And the words would be homonymous like their/theyre/there, inside sentence context so a human can easily tell which meaning is intended.
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As you post shows, a depressingly high proportion of people who claim English as their native language get this sort of thing wrong, so your strategy would have a distinctly high false positive rate (where misidentifying a real human as an unsuccessful voice-recognising robot is a false positive).
You may find that non-native speakers of English (or whichever language you're
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I don't accept blocked/800/877 and Unavailable caller ID.
You might want to include 888 and 866 numbers in there too. Also the next block of area code toll free numbers is expected to be 855 so preemptively blocking those ones may be advisable as well.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since the time wasted of my life can never be recovered, a punitive fine of ten times that wasted time removed from the telemarketing company CEO's life should be perfectly reasonable.
'Did you resent that waste of your time? Press *1 to remove one minute fifteen seconds from Mr M Sandon's life now.'
I understand it's an option on the latest Asterisk build.
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Citation needed.
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The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights [un.org], see Article 23:
Article 23.
* (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
* (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
* (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
* (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
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I'm pretty sure Lindsay Lohan tweeted that *exact* same thing right after she got sentenced.
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So those who want a life long profession in the child abduction and rape profession are good to go, right?
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I look at the question more along the lines of "an individual has a right to make a living" more than "a particular class of worker has a right to make a living" or even "an individual has a right to make a living doing a job which otherwise violates some other portion of the social compact." As to your second point, I avoid law school under the stated reasoning that if I were to become a mafia hitman, I'd probably make more money and get a more fair treatment in the press than my own defense attorney.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, I'm a professional face-puncher. The professional face-puncher has a right to make a living. You may choose to block my punch or to not be there when my punch arrives, but I will still try to make a living punching your face "because I have the right to make a living."
Hi, I'm a professional pot-banger. The professional pot-banger has a right to make a living. You may choose to block my banging or to not be there when my banging occurs, but I will still try to make a living banging my pot "because I have the right to make a living."
Hi, I'm a professional flatulator. The professional flatulator has a right to make a living. You may choose to block my farts or to not be there when my fart arrives, but I will still try to make a living farting on your face "because I have the right to make a living."
I do hope I made my point clear with regards to your first sentence.
Stomp (Score:2)
Hi, I'm a professional face-puncher.
There are probably plenty of boxing leagues that want you.
Hi, I'm a professional pot-banger.
From Stomp [wikipedia.org]?
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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.
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And the companies hiring them have the right to piss off.
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 :)
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"Can you elaborate on that?
What makes you believe I might be interested in your product?
You seem quite positive."
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Interesting)
I want any call that comes in without caller ID to do that without ever fking ringing my phone. And get this, I'd pay the app writer a premium if their adaptive voice app keeps the shitheels on the phone for more than 5 minutes. Even better if this worked in concert with the service provider so I could still get calls.
Myself and some friends played a game in the 90s for a short time called "Fk the telemarketer", this was with land lines as cellphone time was too expensive. The goal was to keep them on the line for excessive amounts of time.
1 point per minute
10 points for every bogus credit card number given
20 for every bogus checking acount number given
100 points for a call back number
1000 points for death threats
The main idea was to record the call and then pick the best on the weekend listening to the recordings, playing D&D and drinking.
My 'feeble old man' was usually the winner and my best ran over 10 minutes of me 'trying to find another card' after having given them a few bogus cards.
I have to say that recording is brilliant in it's timing. I always thought an Elisa style program done with a text to speech program was the way to go but did not have the coding skills so lost interest.
The group I hung out with broke up and drifted apart. A few dunked phones and lost emails and a level of paranoia about 'real names' and I doubt I could find them again. I did keep in touch with two of them but the connection is tenuous at best and I've not heard from them in a few years.
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Re:There is an app for that. (Score:5, Interesting)
My uncle used his six-year-old as that "smart adaptive application". Kid loved talking on the phone, so he got any telemarketer. Would often take them quite a while to work out that the excited claims of "Gosh!" and "Wow!" weren't really leading to a sale.
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Or, better yet, the ability to automatically reject calls from anyone not on your phone's phonebook.
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Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Government agencies can contact me in writing if they must. In fact I find it far more likely that an unkown number calling me and claiming to be the police is actually a fraudster.
Out of curiosity: why is a government agency going out of its way to make it hard for you to confirm their identity when they contact you?
I don't want to talk to them, especially unprepared and wondering if I'm talking to a fraudster. I want a letter inviting me to either visit or call them or mail another letter, with sufficient time to think what I'm going to say.
And yes, I'll often get calls from such numbers; avoiding that is the whole point of this kind of block.
If you work in a field where employees compete for employers, congratulations; but please understand that for most people it's the other way around, so strangers contacting us are far more likely trying to get than to give us money.
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I wish I could make my phone just answer all unidentified calls with the message:
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Re:There is an app for that. (Score:5, Interesting)
One time I had someone getting very defensive when I managed to get them to agree they'd started with what was essentially a lie (I'd "won" something). Another time I shifted the conversation onto what colour underwear the caller was wearing.
I make a game of it. Do I have nothing better to do? Well, I could be reading Slashdot or watching TV - in other words, nope.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Informative)
Then I leave the phone somewhere and forget about it (record is 15min of waiting). Every time I do that they blacklist my number.
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"Mr Jones? Sure, I'll just go and get him." [leave the phone under the sofa cushion]
And you're right, they blacklist your number after you do this, so it works out well.
Rich.
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Interesting)
My record is over 18 min I have handed the one telemarketer around to different staff members who keep "why did they forward you to us? we are HR/Billing/IT/whaterver. You will need to talk with Accounts, I will just put you through..." and forward the call to another co-worker and tell them to leave em on hold for 30sec and then answer and BS your way into getting them back onto hold :)
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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It's fun, isn't it? Those of us with sadistic tendencies but these inconvenient scruples get to have fun without the guilt picking on people we don't even feel remotely sorry for.
I've answered the phone as Satan, I've tried converting a telemarketer to Zoroasteranism, all great fun. One of my favorites, though, was when I had one trying to sell me windows and I told her my house burned down. It took a couple minutes before it dawned on her that I was talking on my landline - ergo, house exists. I told
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I've answered the phone as Satan, I've tried converting a telemarketer to Zoroasteranism, all great fun.
Your slashdot ID is such an appropriate number for that form of work.
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Another time I shifted the conversation onto what colour underwear the caller was wearing.
You would be surprised to learn how welcome such conversations are. A ray of light in an otherwise mind numbing day.
It's easy to forget that the caller is a human being too - one who hates his job. Nobody I know likes this job. People do it because they see no other choices left. No matter how annoying these calls are for you - it's still worse for the poor sod who has to call people 6 to 8 hours a day, always telling the same, always talking about the same bullshit.
Behind the scenes there is often a lot
Re:There is an app for that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Having actually done telemarketing (only for a month - couldn't stand it) the managers there *freaked out* over any call that lasted more than a minute - not even kidding - they came unglued doubly so when there was no sale.
One of them explained to me they had a special agreement with the phone company where the initial part of the call was cheap, but went up over time (not sure if they do this in the UK) - so a 2-3 minute call would cost them a lot more than normal. Home long distance services its the reverse - the call price goes down the longer you stay on.
So yes - wasting their time really does piss them off to no end.
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I love how the telemarketer calls you shameless and rude. :P
genetic algorithms (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm... permutations of random interactions and voice prompting plugged into a genetic algorithm. Best series of responses wins.
Epic.
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I like this idea a lot - someone definitely needs to develop a phone answering bot that could detect when the telemarketer has finished giving their spiel, so it could let the telemarketer give their spiel, then respond with one of several pre-recorded messages that are selected by the GA, and as you suggest, have it keep trying different combinations so that it selects the sorts of responses that keep the telemarketer tied up as long as possible.
I get one or two calls every day from someone wanting donatio
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After all you don't really care about recognizing what's in the spiel right?
I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose, if used at the subscriber's election (opt-in strictly) on their live telephone line, it could have limited uses...but setting up 4 million lines stri
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how about reading the article?
i mean... so you know what you're talking about?
to answer your questions:
-the numbers are on a do not call list, so the companies haven't got the slightest right to call them, it's illegal in fact
-it would be an opt-in for clients, but currently only active for unused numbers of the company (the ton of numbers they haven't assigned to a customer yet), and for the numbers of their own offices.
i mean seriously... are you just trolling? cause your entire comment is just so wrong -
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to answer your questions: -the numbers are on a do not call list, so the companies haven't got the slightest right to call them, it's illegal in fact
In this scenario, yes; to be entirely honest, I'm not entirely sure--haven't looked yet--but I'm willing to place a bet that if an unused number is on the United States' Do Not Call list, it doesn't mean a whole lot because a subscriber did not request it, rendering that fact moot. Might be different in the UK, I don't live there, and in many facets their laws and trends are different from those in the US.
The number still belongs to someone, or they wouldn't be allowed to hook up a honeypot system in the first place, ergo they are allowed to request that it be put on the Do Not Call list. They'd just have to take it off the list when they sell the number on to someone else if the subscriber requested it.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
At cursory glance of TFA(s), they appear to be just an ISP with that happens to subscribe to a whole lot more incoming phone numbers than they currently use in their own office, which simply isn't all that uncommon in a world of VoIP and PRI for any business.
The offer VoIP services, including routing calls from POTS to VoIP for their customers. The numbers that they have are ones that have not yet been assigned to a customer. You typically get these assigned in large blocks, and they appear to now be using all of the ones that are assigned to them but not yet given to a customer for the honeypot.
As an added bonus, by the time that they are given to a customer, it's likely that they will likely already be blacklisted by telemarketers, making these numbers more attractive to potential customers than ones from other companies.
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Good enough -- I hadn't researched them in any great detail beyond what TFA(s) offered.
However: Does any of the verbiage that you posted mean, in any way, that they are not currently subscribers whom are assigned these numbers?
Okay telemarketers - your move! (Score:5, Interesting)
Laws against certain types of telemarketing just pushed it offshore.
Better spam filters in turn created better spammers.
I will watch with a sort of morbid curiosity what the telemarketing industry comes up with next, assuming that this idea makes their current business model unworkable.
The do not call register in Australia has worked surprisingly well for me. I've had a very very small number of calls that were flat out illegal. We get calls from people trying to get us to sell raffles for charities (which are legal but have to call within certain hours) but they all use listed numbers so we simply don't answer them, and we let withheld numbers go to voicemail most of the time (the phone is configured to not even ring when a withheld number calls).
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If the caller persists despite your objections, you can always go to the police about harassment and obtain a police report number, and inform the caller of such. If the same caller persists, it quickly becomes criminal harassment. This mechanism pre-dates and operates outside of do not call lists.
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It' remarkable if you stop and think about it for a moment. An entire industry devoted to calling people who don't want to be called in order to offer them products they don't want to buy.
Honestly, it sounds like something Douglas Adams would come up with.
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That's a good idea on the surface but on the basis that these guys are already breaking the law, they can just set up a voip connection themselves locally (even on a compromised PC) and just bounce the call off that. Then they are no longer calling from overseas as far as anyone can tell.
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Then whoever provided the VoIP access account, whichever customer signed up for it (or the provider, in case of a fraudulent customer) will be on the hook for paying all those $0.50 charges to the government, as soon as it's shown that the caller identity was fake.
As in, the law should state $0.50 is due for each VoIP call connected to a PSTN gateway, and it can only be waived, if the provider can prove their customer is in the US, and the caller id they send shows their working US phone number.
If th
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So spammers hijack computers, the owners get stuck with the bill. Again, the spammer doesn't care if you get charged. Incidentally, you can't force a 50 cent price on long distance anyway. That goes against pretty much everything the US is supposed to stand for. Also, it won't work, as you are underestimating how easy it is to hijack or bypass any system. Everyone gets hurt, except the spammer and the phone company collecting the 50 cents.
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I've taken a few calls at work from 'my bank' about my bank account who wish to speak to 'the account holder', who's name they don't even know.
The wife of the general manager at work took a call (at home) from someone claiming to be from my work asking if she'd like to buy some cheap computers.
Lately it's been 'my telco' phoning up about a virus infection on my computer. So the DNC register doesn't catch the really crooked guys, but at least they are a bit of fun :)
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These people are the scum of the earth
Just so we're all clear, telemarketing companies are scum of the earth. The people calling you are just trying to do their job (and aren't getting paid much for it).
I'm all for wasting their time (as I understand it, they get paid by the hour, so "Maria" in India doesn't get hurt by us messing with her, just the employer), but I don't think many of them are bad people.
Besides, the successful snakeoil salesmen will quickly move on to used cars and such anyway, so odds are your call is from someone reading a
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Just so we're all clear, telemarketing companies are scum of the earth. The people calling you are just trying to do their job (and aren't getting paid much for it).
While I can sympathize with someone who has to work a job they hate, they chose to do that job. In some neighborhoods kids join gangs because they think it's the only way to survive. That doesn't make them any less scummy when they commit crimes.
You don't get to absolve yourself of antisocial acts by saying you're "just doing your job".
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hehe... yes I've heard of Mary from Melbourne.
You'll find it will take around 30 days for your number to actually appear on the list, and for the next few months after that you'll get the odd caller who's list is out of date for some reason or another (very apologetic because they are trying to be 'legitimate' and know they can get in a heap of trouble for calling).
You may also have inherited a number that just seems to get a lot of calls. When we first moved in to this house (brand new house but obviously
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If you think about it, someone who pays all their bills is more likely to hold on to the same phone number for
decades. So if you get a new number, there is a higher probability that debt collectors will be calling it.
I have had my number for 6 or 7 years and I still get calls for the same two or three names. I screen ALL my calls
so they are going to keep calling and they are not getting anywhere.
The sad thing is I pay all my bills and I still get calls from debt collectors -- looking for other people.
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!
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I think a bot has a better chance of passing a Turing test than a telemarketer.
Man in the Middle (Score:5, Funny)
2. Put them on the phone with each other.
3. ???
4. Hilarity ensues.
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And in the ten years I've had a desk job, only one there too. I was almost sold a fitted kitchen for my area in the open plan office. The microwave and integrated ironing board would have been sweet...
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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]
3 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
But I guess this is not as much breaking news as it is a confirmation, .
Do Not Call lists really help TM companies (Score:4, Interesting)
The Do Not Call and Do Not Mail lists in Australia are a great help to Telemarketing companies like us. We pay for flagfalls on all our calls, and we use two predictive diallers to do the job so our telcom bills were always high. It basically gives us a list of people who are certainly not going to buy things over the phone from us. Since the DNC list was put into place, our call to sale ratio went up considerably. Thanks ADMA!
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I never thought of it that way. It's pretty win-win, isn't it?
We need an opt in list for tele and email sales (Score:5, Insightful)
We need an opt in list.
Then it should be published on the internet because it is those bastards who are the ones who have kept the spammers in work all these years, while the rest of us have been trying to get rid of them!
They deserve vilification just as much as the spammers themselves.
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Just start a spam campaign of New Cheap Viagra, now with Extra Cyanide!
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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.
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Wait, it cost 5k but brought in 30k? That's a 5x ROI. Why did you "have to stop" then?
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If only telemarketers in EVERY OTHER COUNTRY used your logic.
I never thought I'd see the day... A respectable, intelligent telemarketing company? SRSLY?
funny but ineffective (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, if they're the phone company, why didn't they just identify the real, actual source of the calls or even just pretend to be interested enough to get the company name and then sue the pants off them and put the upper management in jail?
Re:funny but ineffective (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if they're the phone company
You seem to be under the impression that this is 1900. They're not the phone company, they're a phone company, and they operate largely over BT's lines. The callers are not coming from the same network that they are using, so all they can do is identify the source network (or, more accurately, the network that routed the calls to them).
Something similar (Score:2)
I have a similar setup, i used to get constant calls from the same small handful of marketing companies so now i have Asterisk configured to route any calls from them to a series of sound samples of borat... He starts off saying hello, waits a few seconds, says hello again, waits a few secs, then asks who he's speaking to etc...
Cell phone use caused by telemarketers (Score:2)
I quit using my landline years ago and only use a cell phone - no more telemarketers. The wireless idea is also handy...
Long before, I quit using my fax machine, since I received primarily junk faxes.
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You'd think.
I have the same thing. They call my cell. Bastards.
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I quit using my landline years ago
Do you still pay for it? Or do you pay for cable TV instead so that you can get cable Internet?
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Don't know where you're at, but we can now get DSL without paying for phone service, and cable internet without cable tv.
In capitalist Britannia,the spammed outspam you ;) (Score:2)
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Working as a dialler coder... (Score:5, Informative)
I work closely with lots of companies in the UK who use a particular predictive dialler. And as such I know that most of these companies are small 10-50 agent setups. Most of the time they have nothing more than the script on a screen, a headset and a 2ft wide desk. It's horrible.
To get to my point... I know for a fact that most companies don't subscribe to the TPS list, and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to use it. I hear some of the support calls come though, and the questions are just terrible/illegal.
The favourite question is "how do I set up pinging". Pinging is basically taking a number range (say 0777xxxxxxx to 0779xxxxxxxx) and ringing each number in sequence. You only connect the call for 1/3rd of a second, so the result is the phone doesn't ring, it just makes a "ping" noise. It is a very bad thing to do. The point is people who are breaking the law by pinging are no going to care about TPS.
There are other regulations, such as "drop rate" which s a measure of how many calls you can throw away without connecting. In the UK it is set at 3% in any 24 hour period. Guess how many try and comply with this....
Generally in the industry, people will try and trick they can. When banned from one provider... switch. The never ending cycle continues.
Posting anon for obvious reasons!
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Finally!! (Score:2)
Telemarketers (Direct Marketting) Association (Score:4, Informative)
For those interested in giving the Direct Marketing (Telemarketers) association feedback on their services their number is:
212 768 7277
and they can be reached by email at:
customerservice@the-dma.org
Enjoy.
Re:Sounds like a good time (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that the marketeer does not care.
Current TPS regulations punish the marketeer and do nothing about the company that ordered it and for the carrier supporting it. As a result unsolicited marketing has simply moved abroad. It started as far back as 2003 and has been moving full steam in that direction.
It is not a regulatory regime it is a marketing joke promoted by marketeers so not surprisingly as anything that is solely marketing driven it does not quite work.
Re:Sounds like a good time (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the marketeer does not care.
Current TPS regulations punish the marketeer and do nothing about the company that ordered it and for the carrier supporting it.
Marketeers usually work on some sort of commission basis. Nobody (except politicians) pays by the number of calls dialed these days.
If 4 million numbers divert to the same honeypot, the marketeers will soon find they can't make any money in that telco's numbers, and they move on.
If its just an auto-dialer playing a taped message, the honeypot might be ineffective, although it still spares the subscriber from getting these calls.
But for those systems that put a sales person on the line as soon as there is an answer, its bound to punish them a little bit till they move to other targets.
As the recipient of too many of these calls, I really don't care who gets punished as long someone does. Punishment need not be all that precisely targeted, as long as someone in the delivery chain feels some pain I'm quite content to let that person redirect the punishment to the proper party.
Costs will go up, and this advertising method will, like the door to door salesman, become too expensive to deploy.
I can dream, can't I?
Re:Sounds like a good time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a good time (Score:5, Informative)
If its just an auto-dialer playing a taped message, the honeypot might be ineffective, although it still spares the subscriber from getting these calls.
I used to work in the telemarketing business, in the back room managing the data so I may have some uncommon insight here.
Legitimate telemarketers work off large lists of numbers, provided by their customers. In this case though it may be simply the list was generated as a complete block of an entire exchange or three. Anyway, the list when provided gets scrubbed against any DNC lists, usually one for client, one for state (by area code) and one exceptions list. (screamers, 911 and other emergency services, cell phone and fax blocks, etc) Sounds like these clods are also skipping that step. By scrubbed I mean dispositioned a DNC termination, that number will not be called.
Anyway, the dial servers are dialing lines faster than all the TCs on the floor can answer. They auto pace their dialing so they get on average someone that has just answered their phone just in time for a TC to become available (off previous call) to keep our TC idle time as low as possible. (cranking up the pass call rate beyond a certain % is also illegal, maybe they're doing that too? that's what gets you calls where there's nobody there when you answer)
So, the TCs can disposition a call such as "no thank you", "call me back later", "answering machine", or some form of sale. Non terminating dispositions just get you dropped back into the pool for calling back again. Robocalls can disposition calls too, such as detecting answering machines or quick hangups. So, having a machine play a recorded message may not help any, depending on how the call gets dispositioned. Or it may cause that number in the list to get terminated and never called again. Depends on what they want to do. I remember getting robocalls for "your new car warranty is about to expire!" almost continuously for a month. In those cases it didn't matter if you took the call, let it ring, or put it on a machine, you'd still get called again in a few hours. But that's not very efficient. They were being highly illegal so for them they probably were more interested in take-the-money-and-run rather than trying to work out an efficient call method for the long haul.
The effectiveness of the honeypot comes down to a battle of resources. The object of the honeypot is to tie up their resources to such a degree that their cost-to-revenue drops below acceptable and they move on. Lets say they are robocalling a block of 10,000 numbers, only 4,000 of which are used. If they call a number that is unused, and you play back an easily identifiable recording, it may be caught by the dialer even before the TC gets it, in which case the dialer dispositions it recording, which may terminate it. In that case, by the time they've gone first pass through all 10k numbers, all 6,000 inactive numbers are terminated and will not be reattempted. So they now focus round 2 on what's left of the 4,000 live bodies. This method fails to deter them because it's only a VERY minor inconvenience on pass 1 only.
If you can get to the TCs and they have to disposition it, you take up a little bit more of their resources in manpower, but you're still very unlikely to survive the first pass. 98% of the recorded disconnect notices will be terminated by the TCs on round 1 and never called again. Again you have not accomplished much.
It becomes much more effective when you can take up their time, such as what this guy is doing. Stall them, tie up a TC and a line on their end, for as long as possible. In the above example, lets say they have 50 TCs taking calls. If 60% of the numbers they call are spoof recordings, you are tying up 30 of their 50 TCs at a time. Assuming you have the tech resources to pull this off, it's wonderful. You have just dropped their conversion rate 60%. If they have anywhere else to call, they will do so, quickly. If they don't give up, they either have nowhere else to cal
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In the USA, it's illegal to use a predictive dialer to call a cell phone.
Yup. Was that way when I was in the 'biz. Since that's all we used, all cell phone blocks were DNCd first thing when a list came in. Though back then there weren't nearly so many cell phones. I'm sure there's easily 100x more now. But we were going by area code and sometimes exchange. I have NO IDEA how they are handling things with "number portability" now. I don't see how you can positively determine if a given number is a ce
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In Georgia, you have to go to Magistrate Court and file a suit against the appropriate person or company (which is sometimes a hard thing to figure out). The relevant statute is 47 USC 227 b 1 A iii, with regulations to match in 47 CFR 64.1200 a 1 iii. I recommend the book "Everybody's Guide to Small Claims Court" by Nolo.
Re:Sounds like a good time (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, a month or so later (NOT BAD for a government agency) I got a notice that they had been fined $2000 based on my complaint. Granted, I didn't get any of that, but it took less time.
I've heard of another guy from CA doing what Sparr0 describes, and he had an in-depth description of what to do. In the end, these jerks really can't defend themselves and often have to pay up. If they don't you might be able to turn it over to a collections agency
Re:Sounds like a good time (Score:5, Informative)
Where I worked, that list was extremely short (under 250 numbers?) and involved people that specifically had made the point that they were going to be litigious or had done so in the past. That, and all of US in the back had our numbers in there too of course. Before I put my number in, I got ONE call from them, and oh it was hilarious. I answered the phone and heard a veeeeery familiar opening sales pitch. "Is this xxxx?" (name of our company) Silence. very long silence. "um. yes it is." haha.. "put me on your Do Not Call list!". I think the rep had me on hold, asking her supervisor, "should I answer that?" I looked in the records that Monday and found my number in that list, correctly terminated DNC.
So yes, it happens, even to "us". That was back in the days of DOS and dbase iv.
We did follow all the rules. (for the most part, the sales managers were constantly nagging us to up the dial rate which would push the pass call limit) Numerous states at that time had DNC lists, I'm sure most of them do at this point. If you were on such a list, we would never call you, for any of our customers, regardless of the customer. I have no idea tho how common or uncommon it is for telemarketing companies to follow all the rules. I suspect the fraction that do not are a small minority, but due to the nature of what this leads to they tend to be very high visibility and give the entire industry a bad rep. Like when a single company can get a dozen states up in arms for blasting their entire population with robocalls for a month straight.
Bonus factoid: the senators that wrote and passed all those nice bills to protect us from harassment over the phone... there's ONE group that is exempt from those laws, in every single case. Care to guess who can get away with it, every time? Political Calls. If you want to direct your ire somewhere, there's a much better target. That's right, your favorite senator can robocall you all day long at election time and there's nothing you can do about it.
Oh, my mistake, one more. Unless it's changed recently, only privately owned numbers can be enforced on the DNC lists. Businesses can try to add their numbers to the lists, but the telemarketers can ignore it. (cannot be fined for calling you even if you're on the list)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The US national DNC registry also allows non profits to call you, in fact it appears they use that list as a call list. When you add your number, suddenly you get tons of calls from people asking for money for a non profit. Also kind of sleazy.
Re:sour note (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't read the article did you?
1. they do have 4 million numbers, they're not a phone compnay but an ISP that offers VoIP services.
2. The numbers they have are assigned to them, and are obviously able to be called, but ar not handed out to a subscriber yet (so technically,A&A are the subscriber).
3. They added every one to the TPS list - that is the correct thing to do. The message they play says the right things, giving the caller a chance to realise its a wrong number before going off on one - its just that telemarketers play a recording, and only connect to a human if you press a key, hence the beep near the beginning of each of the traps they have on the website. Regular people are going to hear the initial 'this is not a valid number'.
Re: (Score:2)
The best suggestion for your wife is to see if her office will set up a call relay. I can do it with my $1000 TalkSwitch pbx I use for my 4 person engineering firm - I'm sure it's possible on just about any modern pbx. She calls in, gives a security code, and then enters the number to dial. The pbx dials out and bridges the two lines. It might cost several hundred dollars to have set up, but that's a small business expense. The down side is that it takes two lines at the office to operate; the up side is