The true way to impose your will on others is to set music ringbacks (the sound the caller hears while they wait for you to pick up). Still popular in India and China, I hear.
like "at the tone press 42 to get through"
except you don't need to provide the instructions, people know to do it.
The screening on my personal phone is such that I will have any person that I expect to be calling already in my directory so that will be identifiable immediately
Maybe it is in China and India, though. I shudder to contemplate the complexity of that switching system, but ... astonishment awaits..?
I think there has to be some dramatic oversimplification in the description though. Telecom signaling is still a network level event, even in mobile networks. The receiving network does not typically provide audio to the caller until the call is complete.
But hey, what a terrible idea! I'm glad to have been old enough in that period (2004-2008) that no one I knew would foist such a thing on a caller.
Not that it makes a big difference anymore when most people are on unmetered calling.
It’s been many years since I’ve encountered it, but was quite scummy because while you’re waiting for the other person to pick up, you’d hear some music and then a voice over saying to press a number now to add it to your own number, for a recurring fee of course.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the people paying for it didn’t intentionally “sign up”, but are just not educated enough to understand what happened or notice their prepaid credit being slowly whittled away by rubbish like this.
The amount of worthless “value added services” pushed onto the poorest here by cellphone service providers is sickening.