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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

I get about 4 "Card Services" or "Google Marketing" or some such robocalls a day, too.

The Verizon customer service rep suggested "just blocking the number" after expressing shock and awe that robocalls happen, and he had never heard of such a thing!

I suggest at least leaving the robocall running until it hangs up. Any given organization has to have a finite number of outgoing lines, and IVR/VRU's, so keeping them occupied should be a priority for all of us. If you've got the time to fuck around with a Real Human, do that, too. They definitely have a large, but finite, supply of call center workers. Keeping them unhappy should be a priority for all of us. The faster someone quits out of despair, the more that they have to pay to train a new worker.

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Most of the call spam blocking solutions suffer from needing to trust Caller ID. Spoofing caller ID is now trivial and used by spammers [1] There are some work arounds to this like "audio fingerprinting".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

These orgs don't necessarily have a finite number of outbound lines - they'd be using SIP and just buy more channels from the myriad providers out there for a few bucks a month. You can also get "unlimited channels"-SIP trunk providers too - in which case you're limited only by the number of simultaneous virtual channels your Asterisk setup can handle.

So no, "keeping them busy" is not a viable solution.

They will have to still pay for it. If the RoI on these kind of campaigns become low enough, due to combination of higher cost and lower conversion, they will abandon it. You could develop a dialer app to autoroute, and perhaps even generate auto responses ( inverse robo call ?) to make it more frustrating

Yes, precisely. Does any research exist on what percentage of, say, cold calls, has to go bad before organizations abandon the practice? I'd google for this, but I'm not certain of what terms to use. It seems to me that percent honeypots might be relevant, percent of sabotage of cold calls, but I just don't know enough of this field to even start to get an answer.

I do know enough to say that a simple North American can cause enough ire in an Indian call center worker, that he will call back 4 times just to say "Fuck you, sir!", and that if, by chance, the same North American call center worker gets you twice in a day, the conversation is quite profane.

> I suggest at least leaving the robocall running until it hangs up.

It only lasts for maybe 15 seconds.

If you want to hurt them more, press 1 (or whatever) to talk to the operator, and string them along.

But the downside - if you care - is that the person working a job in some hellish call center probably gets dinged, performance wise, for spending 15 minutes on a go-nowhere call with you.

But on the gripping hand, you can't hurt the top without hurting everyone along the path - from the person on the phone, up to the call center manager, up to the call center owner, up to the actual business contracting through them.

They took an evil job. I'm fine with them getting a poor performance review.

I would take an evil job to feed my family if I had no other choice; sometimes people don't.

I honestly don't care. There are extremely few instances where that's actually the case. And it still doesn't excuse the fact that the job is evil.

But it is something to take into consideration when you're punishing someone. You're actively making someone's life worse - you can argue that it's for a good cause, but you can't look away from the collateral damage, even though it's small.

No, it isn't. And I'm not doing a thing. They made the choice to do evil. They are the ones that made their life worse.

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