If you hate telemarketers, you’ll love this robot designed to waste their time
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
If the following fake recording[1] with the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers, I'd rather the service do something like that. I also remember seeing a dedicated electronic box[2] that had that recording built-in. You either held it to the mouthpiece of the phone or it was wired in-line between the handset and the base. I'm not sure of the success rate of that device. I wouldn't be surprised if a developer attempted to replicate that device by making an app on iPhone/Android. Again, I'm not sure if pressing a smartphone speaker to the mouthpiece of a handset is good enough audio fidelity to fool robo dialers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE4zZwDE7bc
[2] not sure if it was this one: http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Technologies-TZ-900-TeleZapper...
I'm still perfectly fine wasting their time.
Honestly, I don't get this reasoning that if they are doing it for a small financial gain, they are resolved of any blame for any harm they cause (even if the harm is just annoying me and wasting my time). Yet I see the reasoning being used in multiple instances where they are causing hassle or worse (say when they lie to you about whats in phone contracts, which is my pet peeve).
Yes, I agree that annoyance is being made and hassle is being caused but I assign the "they" part more to the owners of the businesses rather than the low-level employees working the phones. Those workers are just cogs in a wheel. Therefore, I don't derive any satisfaction of justice by making employees suffer the games of an AI Turing Test. On the other hand, I am happy when business owners pay $100,000 fines for ignoring the Do-Not-Call list.
The workers vs owners distinction is the same for fast-food cashiers asking "do you want to Super Size that?", or Radio Shack employee requesting my phone number for their database, or a retail employee trying to sell me an "extended warranty". For each of those situations, I'm annoyed but it's not necessary for me to socially shame the low-level workers with rants about obesity and high-fat consumption, the dangers of privacy invasion and identity theft, and the financial foolishness of 3rd-party warranties. All those employees are just cogs in a wheel and they are required to follow a script and upsell those things. Otherwise, they are fired. I see most telemarketing employees in equivalent situations++. Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer. Instead, just don't spend money with the business or utilize technical tricks (e.g. phone TeleZapper).
++To level set, I'm not talking about criminal activities such as scammers making calls to trick senior citizens into wiring their life savings. I'm talking about the single mother or starving college student who sees a job ad for "$8/hour tele-sales" and hopes to get money for diapers or ramen noodles. The telemarketing I was thinking of was newspaper subscriptions, church donations, burglar alarms monitoring, etc.
And yet, if we did that to such an extent that most people couldn't work those jobs with those policies, would not society be better off as a whole?
>Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer.
Speaking of war, the general way it goes is that you shoot the soldiers even though they are just following orders and there are a dozen more to take their place. Ideally taking out the general would be best, but when not given the opportunity to do so you target the highest ranking person in front of you, even if that is the lowly private who is on the same level as you.
Your attitude isn't just out of touch with reality, it's somewhere between 'callous and unsympathetic' and 'sociopathic.'
Roughly 95% of the people who work in crappy low-wage jobs like fast food or call centers already hate their jobs. They already hate what their employers tell them they have to do. They aren't there because they love cold calling strangers or asking you to upgrade your meal by 1000 calories, they're there because they need a paycheck and have little other alternative.
I can only speak from personal experience regarding call centers, but I imagine fast food isn't very different. Most people absolutely do get out of those jobs as fast as they can. In the call center I worked at, average tenure was 6 months if not less (that's exactly how long I lasted, FWIW). And you know what? Every time a person walks out the door, someone else walks in to take their place, because the world has no shortage of desperate people.
Taking the stance of 'we should torture these people as much as possible because we don't have access to their employers' is bad enough, but to smugly claim that it's really for their own good and the good of society is frankly disturbing.
As is needed of any soldier killing a guy who doesn't want to be there just as much as they don't. Probably the most sociopathic thing I did today was I just ate a Butterfingers candy bar, made by Nestle, and thus likely involved child slavery, which I funded by buying the candy bar. But I do think my informed apathy is a step up from ignorant bliss.
>Roughly 95% of the people who work in crappy low-wage jobs like fast food or call centers already hate their jobs. They already hate what their employers tell them they have to do. They aren't there because they love cold calling strangers or asking you to upgrade your meal by 1000 calories, they're there because they need a paycheck and have little other alternative.
And if their work isn't a net harm for me, I'll try try to make their day more pleasant. But when I'm at the local cell store again because another family member was lied to about their contract, or when you just interrupted my concentration while solving some problem to try to get me to sign up for some service that will be near impossible to cancel and which comes with more fine print than my employment contract, then I am not going to excuse you just because you did such for money.
>Taking the stance of 'we should torture these people as much as possible because we don't have access to their employers' is bad enough, but to smugly claim that it's really for their own good and the good of society is frankly disturbing.
>torture
I found the bug.
Environmental protection. Benefit should be obvious.
Reducing drunk driving. Ditto.
Insurance (not the kind that would be better off replaced by single payer). Probably the least obvious as it is closest of the three to rent seeking, but the benefit is spreading risk of the incidents insured. Perhaps not as ideal as a fully socialized government system, but this isn't one of the insurance fields that is in direct competition with single payer.
Do you want a list of my non-work related contributions to society as well?
Each of your examples is providing me with a service; making food, ringing up my order, charging my card, or otherwise servicing the store of which I'm a customer. I'm happy to allow them some room for corporate bullshit, because they're also doing something I want them to do.
What does a telemarketer do for me?
A question that the game paper please asked, is how plausible it is for a person living near staving condition to give up on their own income on the basis of morals. If at the same time you are working in a environment which directly rewards unmoral behavior with promotions, I wonder if such that behavior doesn't simply become the norm and moral people either quit or do not take up the job in the first place.
How does your analysis translate to soldiers who are ordered to torture prisoners? Or Dickens-style juvenile pickpockets?
If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors, you go right ahead. But if you think you're teaching that telemarketer a lesson or somehow punishing them, you're not. They won't even remember you at the end of the day. You are one of 100+ calls that telemarketer has to make every day. And if you don't say the magic words "please take my name off your list", they will call you again next week. So you're really just wasting your own time.
Releasing steam against the telemarketer is legal, there's a reason for it, and it relieves the immediate tension build up.
>They won't even remember you at the end of the day.
Depends upon spontaneous creativity. I don't have much, so they probably want. But in some ways, even if you don't directly recall the experience, it can still have an impact. If I had not eaten every meal I don't remember anything about, I would be dead right now.
>If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors,
You make it sound like it is because they are economically inferiors is the reason people react negatively and in doing so ignore all the actual reasons people don't like telemarketers.
>So you're really just wasting your own time.
The telemarketer already did that for me.
How can I complain? Because I have a load of complaints for each of those companies, and I want to turn them in to the FCC for spoofing their Caller ID, which is illegal.
No? Crickets?
The sole and only weapon we have is to waste the time of the call center people. In at least some of the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" calls, the call center people are in on the scam - they collect credit card number, last 4 of social, CVV and ZIP code of billing address, which is more than enough to use the credit card number without the cardholder's knowledge. In summary, they deserve what they get, and they know it.
The real question... Why is caller ID spoofing even possible. I assert that it should not be.
Same story with abusing SSNs as an authentication mechanism.
I've reported any number of robocalls-to-do-not-call numbers to the FCC, and exactly nothing has happened. I have no faith that complaining about spoofed caller ID will cause any action at all.
I'm pretty close to the point where I just leave the ringer on my phone off permanently. If somebody calls and I want to speak to them, I'll eventually call back. This sucks because I do speak to my parents on the phone, so we end up playing a lot of phone-tag trying to reach each other.
Sadly, the best way to do this is to make it less profitable for them to employ these business practices. And there are only two ways for you to do that: don't buy their products and force them to spend more money per sale (i.e. waste their time).
Why "sadly"? It is great that we can drive them out of the market just by not paying them, without laws, politics and any kind of coercion.
How is that not an issue for the law?
Side note: Thankfully I have my Android phone set to quiet hours until 8am when I was getting up today, otherwise I'd have been awakened by a scam health insurance robo-call before then.
It is the reason to waste telemarketing company owners money. As a result, telemarketing would become less effective, and employees would lose their job, but it is a good thing.
The goal is not more workplaces. Artificial workplaces are worse than charity or basic income. When people do useless jobs, such as selling tickets, advertising over the phone or on streets etc. they are wasting their time. They can spend it looking for a more interesting job or learning some new skill.
The actual (Indian, but the company is based in London) callers have been known to call and hang up repeatedly, insult or threaten the person being called when they demand to be taken off their contacts list ot demand to know where they got their information from in the first place etc.
I've setup a service so if the number is withheld or international, it plays a recording asking the user to press 1 to speak to a person. It works 95% of the time.
I assume the dialers interpret it as an answer machine so don't connect the call to a real person. A couple of family members have withheld numbers, and they know they just need to press 1 as soon as they here it to reach us.
There's a couple of comedians who have specialized in baiting telemarketers[1][2]. It's a whole art form, trying to keep the telemarketer engaged while spinning the most ridiculous yarns. The horny priest, the bill collector, the retarded guy, the deaf guy, the guy who couldn't stop burping.
1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jim+florentine+...
2. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+mabe+telema...
But viscerally, I can understand why we do this; my impulse, when on the receiving end of an unsolicited inbound call, would be to do the same.
Those who steal are often not in the best of financial straights. Yet we still punish them. Those who commit even worse crimes are often meeting some unmet need or desire, one which may only exist because they are mentally ill, and yet this means we see them as a danger to society. We may pity them, but we will still punish them.
So, shouldn't the same logic apply even when the wrong being committed is much milder? The punishment will be milder (get yelled at, have time wasted) since the wrong is milder, but they still deserve the social repercussion of their actions.
To put it another way, being extreme mean, rude, and condescending to and wasting the time of telemarketers isn't illegal either. Yet some are trying to say doing such is wrong, to which I say that the telemarketers have already committed a greater wrong of the same nature.
The basic idea is that they call you up and offer you something for free or at a steep discount. They explain that they need a small holding fee which will be returned to you, then they run off with your money and you never hear from them again. Free solar panels, vacation cruises, driveway sealing, and discount home repairs/weatherization seem to be the common flavors.
This definitely works - https://www.donotcall.gov/ not always though
... so... it doesn't work?
"They've done studies you know. 60% of the time, it works every time"
It's the reason I keep a phone hanging on the wall.
I'm in the US. We have a do-not-call registry. Spammers don't seem to care and hide their numbers, so I can't report them.
My dad has a V10 on Verizon and they don't have the reject private calls option--so it would appear that some carriers are removing functionality that is otherwise available on at least some phones. Figured I'd share because I had before assumed it was a technical problem to block the private numbers, and have been happily surprised now that I don't get calls from "Unknown" anymore.
Frankly, I wish "private" numbers were banned outright. I can't think of a good reason for allowing them.
While this might be a clever single experiment, this is a really bad idea to run a bot like this running on your phone line. Oral contracts over the phone exist so you should avoid any kind of agreement when a telemarketer calls you. (IANAL, I'm not a lawyer, etc...)
Does the phone-owner have a responsibility for any contract made over that phone?...
I fail to see how "fighting" telemarketers will improve anything.
Plus, these recordings like Jolly Roger, Lenny, etc. are a tremendous source of entertainment!
It's not a matter of effectiveness, it's a matter of ethics. You don't spam the spammer. You don't fight an evil with evil.
Except apparently enough people buy their junk/scams/whatever that it makes it viable to continue to run a telemarketing business. But just because a small percentage of people are into it doesn't mean it's right for them to harass everyone.
So from my perspective, as someone who's not into being telemarketed and who doesn't have the power to make their behavior punishable by law, I may disincentivize their behavior while entertaining myself.
But I guess that's not as exciting, no "entertainment" there.
Whenever I get one I report it to the FCC, although the numbers are likely spoofed.
I've never been telemarketed by the same organization twice though, so I can idealistically hope that each organization has been shut down.
Edit: But back on topic, why shouldn't people live their lives in a way that entertains them more? The telemarketers are the ones initiating unwanted contact.
Sounds like the kindergarten definition of "fair" to me.
When we just say no to them we hurt the very foundation of the telemarketing company. When you prank answer them you definitely do it, but you also hurt the guy that's after a (humble) paycheck while doing it.
But I guess the next argument is "they can always just quit" right? Yeah, let's all get together and make a profession miserable because they can always just quit...
I give to several causes important to me and my family. I also tell them NOT to solicit me more than once during the year. Violators get one additional warning and then I skip a year of donation with a note as to why.
If you want my money, respect my time; it's part of the deal.