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.

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.

The spam call filter is arguably one of the best benefits of using a Google Voice number. My spam call and voicemail folder is full of SEO, payday loan, and other outright scam messages. Just activate the filter and you never see these calls unless you go into the spam interface on the Voice site. You can manually add a number to your spam block but most calls are auto-blocked against a list of known offenders.

I use google voice (hangouts?) and get 3 to 6 robo voicemails a day. They are 2-5 seconds in length, and empty.

You have to activate spam call filtering, it is not on by default.

I do have it enabled and they still get through. I also have 'straight to voicemail' turned on for all calls, so maybe that bypasses the spam check...

Google Voice filters out most of the spam calls I get, but there's still one or so per day that make it through.

Be careful about leaking your phone number online, such as in whois data or other places. I started an LLC a few years ago and my god the number of spam calls I got, it was absolutely ludicrous (I still get them to this day, although it's now on the order of 2 a month)

Oh god, not just phone calls, but mail, too. And they make some weird connections. I once got a credit card offer that was addressed to me and a woman who's name I did not recognize. It took me a few minutes to realize that she and her husband ran the ISP I used. I was the business contact for my domain, but she was the technical contact since she was at the hosting company. Luckily my spouse is a very understanding person! She was like, "Why are you getting credit card offers with this other woman's name on them?"

I've gone as far as reporting the numbers to my state AG, but it clearly hasn't stopped them. I get them constantly. I used to hang up right away but these days I try to keep the robot on the line as long as possible to make it less cost effective to call me.

Do we need the equivalent of Fail2Ban for phone numbers? Some app that allows you to flag calls, and past some threshold the whole network bans the number?

As far as I know, they just spoof the originating number. This makes reporting the numbers useless, as well as any kind of blacklisting. Imagine if you could send spam emails from any arbitrary IP address or domain you wanted to. Blacklisting would be meaningless in that case.

The spoofing happens frequently and it's incredibly frustrating if you are the unfortunate person whose number gets spoofed.

My number got spoofed by a robo-dialer who called the ENTIRE +1 469 prefix. I received dozens of calls a day from angry people who got called.

I’m afraid my number might be used as the originator someday. Often when I get these calls, I keep them on the line as long as possible, feigning interest in whatever they’re selling. I figure as long as I tie them up, maybe I can waste a bit of their resources. Probably futile, but makes me feel better.

Except they might retaliate one day and set their outgoing ANI to my number...

I do the same. A few of them got very angry, yelling quite creative obscenities. Some were amusing and I had never heard of. I took it as a an enriching cultural exchange. But did realize they have my number and could do something like what you suggested.

It's a fun hobby to learn to swear in all kinds of languages. Russians are very creative in this respect.

For a long time now I've received many many more robocalls than real calls. It makes me want to turn off the phone features of my phone.

I did! You can do that with most providers. If they don't explicitly offer it, just tell them you want to switch to an tablet/iPad plan. I pay $15/month for a 3 GB data-only plan and $1/month for a VoIP number that routes SMS to email/app (voip.ms), for those 2 people I know who still use SMS.

> for those 2 people I know who still use SMS.

Interesting. I think I use SMS for more people than every other phone-based method of contact put together.

US high schooler here. I use SMS pretty frequently if you count iMessage, maybe real SMS with 2 or 3 people.

I use a lot of messaging apps, just not SMS. Partly for privacy reasons, partly for convenience.

Hmm. Convenience is the exact reason I'd give for staying away from "a lot of messaging apps" and using primarily SMS. I've got a couple friends that really like Signal, so that's the only other messaging app I ever install.

I pick up and say "Please put this number on your do not call list", talking over them if necessary.

People doubt it, but this works. They don't actually want to waste resources on you if you are not a good lead. Even the scammers want to be efficient.

You actually get real people who are calling you, and not "if you're interested, press 1"?

If you're on Android, there's call-blocking apps that let you do various kinds of blacklist/whitelist call screening.

For now, I block spammy numbers and unknown/private numbers. If it gets bad, I'll move to a whitelist (only people on my contact list ring through).

It's galling beyond belief that any political party anywhere would let the abuse of the phone system become a free speech issue. These people are actively making the world worse. (And what's worse is how cheaply they're bought off. Come on, you scummy congresspeople, are you really worth so little?)

These exist for most phones and provider. However, having read the terms of service on them, they pretty much collect a bunch of data about you for marketing purposes, so it kind of defeats the point. They will, for example, collect the numbers of everyone who calls you. (They have to be able to do that in order to look up and block calls from known spammers.) No thanks.

My experience tells me it varies by network. All my family runs on ATT, Verizon and TMobile.. and all get spam by robocalls. Meanwhile I have SimpleTalk (which is a rebrnd t-mobile so you get reception of tmobile network under silly name simpletalk), I got about 10 robocalls since I have this number circa 2011.

Also - certain area codes are hotter than others. While I have Cali number, I know many folks living in Alaska and never got robocalled.

This is a funny routine: http://sfglobe.com/?id=18461

Also:

> The Jolly Roger Telephone Co.

> Tired of telemarketers? Now you can turn the tables on them with this clever bot.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/202664225/the-jolly-rog...

I used to get one or two robocalls a month, but over the past 2-3 months I've been getting multiple nearly every single day.

What's really interesting is that I'm seeing a lot of spoofed numbers from my same area code, and even from the same branch (i.e., the next four digits). My guess is that the robocallers have found that people are more likely to pick up when the call might be coming from next door.

Yeah, me, too. And the calls are mostly from numbers near my number. Only once did I get repeated calls from the same number (until I blocked it). Very, very annoying.

I'm at the point where I'm going to start telling places my Skype ID and let them figure out how to contact me. We don't need our phone numbers any more.

The problem is, we do. Telegram, LINE, 2fa on many sites, banks, they all want my phone number. They require it. I already use a google voice number, but that still doesn't solve it all (still getting tons of bot voicemails)

nomorobo.com works well for me (with an AT&T U-verse VOIP line). You need to have the "simultaneous ring" feature, which most mobile phone carriers do not provide.

Is getting a new number a bad option for you?

Ehh, sentimental value. I've had it since I was 13 or so. Plus I occasionally get a random text from an old friend.

I've thought about it though. If I knew it'd fix the problem, I might do it. But the robocalls seem to scale up faster than new numbers. I guess it'd be a nice reprieve.

I have had several friends and colleagues get new numbers and immediately be hounded by collection agencies looking for the old owner of the number. Some of these collection agencies also stared sending postal mail to their homes based on the linking this new number with their addresses.

There's an easy way to stop this. After it happens call the police and say you're getting harassing calls. They'll file a police report. You then call the phone company and tell them you've been getting harassing calls, have a police report, and would like to put a trace on your line. They'll give you a phone number to call. Whenever you get a debt collector calling you, you dial the number. After 3 or 4 calls, the police will contact the debt collector and tell them to stop calling you. They will.

It's against the law for collection agencies to call you if you tell them not to.

Oh! If it's against the law, surely that will stop annoying phone calls! How did we not think of that easy solution to the problem!?

You can actually sue them if they do call you after you tell them not to for $1200 per violation. Is also illegal for them to call mobile phones. This technology actually cropped up because collection agencies are getting backlash from using robo dialers. I'd argue collection agencies are much more regulated than telemarketers. Google the FDCPA law.

It never helps.

I seem to have a very good number. I never got a call from telemarketers. Might be the German laws or the fact that I have had that number since the dawn of mobile phones.

robocalls are made by war dialers.