After a long delay I have recorded episode 16 of the Jolly Roger Telephone podcast. In this episode I discuss “ringless voicemail” and the “Can you hear me now?” scam that have both been circulating around the internet for a few weeks. I share three fantastic (and extremely vulgar) calls with you. If you don’t have time to listen, here’s what I basically think about these two issues:
Ringless Voicemail:
Somehow this turned into a partisan issue. I guess someone at the Republican National Committee supported a proposal to the FCC and now the headlines are saying it’s a Republican idea. But it’s just a proposal by various trade organizations to get around the “opt in” nature of telemarketing calls to your mobile. I cannot imagine this will ever be approved, but if it is, we will all just sign up for a voicemail transcription service and these messages will be filtered by a junk mail algorithm. Or we all just shut off our voicemail. I don’t think it’s a big deal.
“Oh my headset slipped. Can you hear me now?”
The headlines say “Don’t say yes! They can use your recording to force you to pay later!” This is another issue that surprises me. Even the FTC and BBB tell you not to engage. There’s a great article from the Archer Security Group at http://www.archersecuritygroup.com/robocallers-pretend-real/ that discusses this. Kerry Tomlinson traced it back to the source and it seems pretty benign. A scammer threatened to take a business to court because they supposedly had a recording of him agreeing to purchase the services. I’m sure if the business had pushed, it would have fallen apart in court. But rather than deal with it, they just paid. Have any of you heard of a telemarketer successfully suing anyone because of a doctored recording? Yeah, me neither. And I don’t think we ever will. There are hundreds of recordings of me saying ‘yes’ on YouTube. Snip one of those and bring it on, telemarketers!
Anyway, here’s the podcast. There are three calls in here, and two of them are extremely raunchy so you have been warned.
Thanks for listening!
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On telemarketers leaving voicemail, ringless or not, I have gotten one voicemail where they did ring. I ended up using a cell with unlimited minutes to give them a few calls back with a Jolly Roger bot already on the line. Nothing good on those calls, and I did have to speak myself at first to make sure that the bot didn’t hang up due to dead air.
On the headset thing, if it were accurate, then a Jolly Roger bot makes a good solution with one proviso. Send all your calls to a bot of the opposite gender. Then, any scammer trying to claim a voice saying ‘yes’ is running into the problem of a female voice saying yes for a male target, or vice-versa. I do suspect that it’s a non-issue. I remember a related idea coming up when answering machines were coming into the world. The idea there was to break into the answering machine and change the outgoing announcement to saying ‘yes’, then making a call billed to a third party, and giving the victim number with the outgoing announcement as that third party. There had to have been enough case law to handle the issue or it would still be a big thing rather than a tidbit that not many people remember.