In this call, our telemarketer is trying to sell me some kind of energy upgrades. These calls are common describing energy programs funded by various cities, counties, states, and even the Federal Government supposedly wants to give you money to remodel your home. Anyway, this guy chats for a while, gets suspicious, then gets sucked back into the conversation. Twice. By the time it’s over, he still thinks he’s talking to a real person. Later versions of this robot will restart, but when I got this call I never suspected anyone would get all the way through the repertoire. Nice job Bot!
These calls were initially meant to be entertaining, funny, and make me feel better for wasting telemarketer time. But I have been overwhelmed by the support on the Internet and I really think we can all work together to break the business model of unsolicited telemarketing. Please back my Kickstarter and let’s stop these scammers!
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So funny, doubly so because I think it was a real offer, we have those schemes in the UK to help cut energy use and improve housing stock 🙂 If so then he’s probably paid by the hour, that’s why he was happy to chat, what a good chap, sounded genuinely concerned for your well-being !
I get these calls ALL THE TIME and they never stop. I don’t have anything against guy, but I don’t think his organization is really helping anyone.
This is fantastic, I am doing something in a similar theme here at the house. I wrote some Perl code that polls CID information on a USR Robotics modem three times a second and if the calling number is not in the whitelist I send an ATA command (data modem, try to sync with the caller) and after 10 seconds it hangs up the line. When I initially started the project I was just picking up and dropping the call but this resulted in positive feedback to the callers that a “human” might be on the line and they’d call back the following day. Now, here’s where the real kicker comes in — by sending the ATA command the calling parties, human or robot dialers, believe they’ve called into a data/modem line and actively remove the number from their call list. Since doing this project the number of telemarketing calls has dropped significantly where I now average one or two calls a week, at most. While your approach is certainly fantastic and addresses the very core of the problem I found that for active removal emulating a data line works great! Keep up the great work!
Thanks! And that’s pretty interesting about using the modem. Is is a fax modem? I wonder if the autodialers think it’s a fax tone. But they just continue to the next number. Let’s start answering the phone again!
I actually left out rev 2; rev 1 was “pick up and hang up” and rev 2 was “fax tones, that makes total sense” until I ended up getting the fax spam over voice. Rev 3 was the data line impersonation and it worked the best. The code is in Perl and I’m happy to GPL it and share it out, but bear in mind I’ve only tested it with the USR Courier modem I have. Might need to modify the ATA codes a bit. I’m just basically using the modem to poll CID data and apply PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) on a whitelist model. The code lets me allow NPA-NXX on the CID number and then constrain down tighter on the CID name for the idiots that do the CID spoofing like “Survey” and “Winner” and “OUT OF AREA”.
All that being said, I just showed my children the videos here and they were full of giggles. I used a rock because I didn’t have a hammer. Wasting the time of the back-end employees descales their calling volume and is the true solution. Lets undermine the false economy.
I’m a “cyber” (hate that word) security guy so the side effect of this all is the laughing at the war-dialing I get from time to time. CONNECT 38400 and such. No chance for actual tty. What surprised me the most about this experiment was the actual active removal. Before I built it we were averaging 20 calls a day. Now, at most, we get …. wow just checked my CID logs; no telemarketers since Jan 29 and that’s when syslog-ng rolled the logs off.
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Fax spam is just as onerous, but it costs toner and paper, not just people time. I wonder if the bot could be modified to introduce noise on the line, cause a resync, and rinse repeat by wasting time in a similar fashion. I might give it a shot, if it works, I’ll GPL it.
You’re on to something here. It costs to scale and JRPC is taking advantage of resource consumption. I applaud the efforts and issue a genuine thanks.