Please back my Kickstarter so we can stop scammers like these!
This latest recording is three calls in one. This agent realized it was a robot early on, and he called back several times to show it to the other agents in his call center. Now, this call actually exposed a bug in my call routing because my robot was not supposed to answer the phone within an hour in order to prevent this scenario. But it turns out that they were calling from a fake caller-id (the fourth digit was a 1, which is impossible in North America), so this call repeatedly went to the robot.
And this allowed the first agent, who realized early on that something was strange with the call, to show off my robot to the other agents in his call center. This call center is one of those “air duct cleaning and 16 point furnace inspection for $35” scams. I assume they’ll want to get a deposit from me at some point. Anyway, so this is a big operation to be hiding behind fake caller-ids. And obviously they have no respect for the people they call. Much like the other calls I have featured on YouTube, these agents may be as duped as the people they’re calling. They’re a little immature, but don’t strike me as scam artists. And they may not even realize their employer is stamping a fake caller-id on their outbound calls.
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I love what you’re doing here and hope you can make an impact on thee calls, but something just occurred to me. Considering all of the press you’ve gotten already, maybe some of these places are aware of your robot by now. For instance, in the first call with 5 people coming to the line, maybe they all just wanted to hear it. And the second caller didn’t last very long, either. Once the nuisance callers recognize it’s your bot they can just hang up and make another call. What is the solution for that?
Good question. I’ll be able to construct different bots to keep them engaged for a minute or two. But the real disruption comes from BREAKING THEIR AUTODIALERS. Autodialers keep a delicate balance of calls-to-agent ratio. If I can get the autodialers to cut through to agents, even if they figure out its a robot quickly, then I can drop their call volume from thousands to hundreds of calls.
OK. Sounds reasonable. I would love to do the voice recordings for one of the other bots. I can write some crazy stuff to say, kinda like your BEE thing.
BTW, my friend Lesa who is a beekeeper, laughed out loud when she heard the bee thing.
Awesome Rich – I will totally be able to use whatever input I can get from everyone. And thanks for sharing with Lesa. I should put together a supercut of the bee reactions for her.
BTW, I am a recording engineer, so doing the VO things would be easy for me.
Also, I was thinking about your recent fame, and I wonder if these backroom/boiler-room/outgoing call-centers share information with one another. Kind of like the way casinos share info and photos on card counters (which doesn’t seem like cheating to me) and ACTUAL cheaters. Maybe they have their own mailing list or online forum or private IRC/IM network where they make each other aware of things like this. Just a thought. Just as you are doing something cool to combat them, maybe this is a kind of cold-war where they will respond to your response, etc…
I look forward to new amusing recordings! This has replaced my old love of the Jerky Boys with a new one (and I hope you take that as the compliment it was intended!).
That is a great compliment – thanks. And you could probably tell from my recordings that I am NOT a recording engineer.
I would assume that these scammers work alone. I think the “legit” outbound call centers probably have conventions, share executives, have telecom carrier support, etc. But they may be just as interested in stopping the scammers as we are. At least I hope so.
Well let’s put a major crimp in their lives/methods/profits! I’m all about it.
I am sure Lesa would LOVE to hear a clip of all the bee responses!
I know it’s a bit of a burden but please keep uploading these frequently! Hilarious!