Over the years since, people have come up with a number of measures to fight these robotic sales calls, not all of them legislative in nature. A friend of mine once developed a gizmo that played the three-tone signal you hear when you call a phone number that is out of service just when he picked up the phone – causing the automatic dialers to think his line was out of order and disconnect. I’ve also known people who kept an air horn by the phone and would just blast the sound down the phone line until the thing disconnected, and people who made a hobby of tracking down the companies that were calling and pranking them in various fashions…
Over the years I’ve worked a number of cold-call jobs, mostly for non-profit organizations (which are exempt from the “Do Not Call” registry), during which I found out that the idiosyncratic pause you here before a modern automatic dialer starts playing its recording isn’t so much the machine waiting to see if the line is out of order as it is a side-effect of the dialing software. When one of these systems is working, each of its outgoing call nodes will be placing a dozen or so calls at once, and as soon as one that isn’t connected picks up it will select that one and start playing. This is how my old friend was able to spoof them into hanging up; it’s also the point at which I usually just hang up the telephone. But those tactics may no longer be enough…
Last week my phone rang, and when I answered it there was a
short pause, and then a woman’s voice said “Hello? Oh, I’m so sorry; I was
having a problem with my headset.” The voice then went into a pitch I’ve heard
many times before, both from automatic dialers and from live telemarketers,
telling me that because I had stayed at one of their “resorts” in the past, I
had won a “free” four-night stay. This is the point at which I usually just say
“Sorry, not interested,” and hang up the phone. If you actually go through with
this scam “prize” you will generally end up having to buy something (typically
transportation or more nights at the “resort”), assuming it’s not just an
old-style phishing scheme in the first place. I did this and didn’t think any
more of it until yesterday…
Shortly after lunchtime yesterday my phone rang from a local number, and when I answered it there was a brief silence, and then a woman’s voice said “Hello? Oh, I’m so sorry; I was having a problem with my headset.” It was the same voice, too. I tried interrupting the message, just to see what it would do, but there was no indication that whatever was reading me the program could hear me, even when I said several unpleasant things about its mother…
I’m not sure how many people are still using disruption devices to foil the automatic dialers, or for that matter how many people just make a practice of hanging up the phone before it starts playing the message. But there’s no question that the computers that run this class of program can store multiple outgoing messages, which means there’s no telling how many times it could make someone hesitate before slamming down the receiver. It’s just their bad luck that it didn’t realize I had heard that specific outgoing message before…
I don’t know what the next phase of this war will be like. But it seems clear to me that no amount of legal or legislative action will ever be able to take out all of the illegal automatic dialers that remain in use – and as of today, the robots seem to be getting smarter than ever…
EDIT: A week or so after I brought you this story, KTLA-TV in Los Angeles broke the news that some versions of this scam are actually recording YOUR voice if you reply to the robot, in attempts to use that recording to con you into believing that you have some verbal contract with the scammer. Which means that, among other things, saying unpleasant things about the robot's mother may not have been a bad response after all. It you get one of these calls you're probably still best off just hanging up, though...
No comments:
Post a Comment