Monday, June 26, 2017

Robocalls and how they work

Have you ever gotten automated calls, where your phone rings and it's a recording on the other end?  Ever wonder how all of that works?  Brian Krebs looked into it:
Several times a week my cell phone receives the telephonic equivalent of spam: A robocall. On each occasion the call seems to come from a local number, but when I answer there is that telltale pause followed by an automated voice pitching some product or service. So when I heard from a reader who chose to hang on the line and see where one of these robocalls led him, I decided to dig deeper. This is the story of that investigation.
He dug into the business model, and who's shadier than whom.  And this is interesting, in a "red on red" targeting sense:
But he said those that end up buying leads from robocall marketers are often smaller mom-and-pop debt relief shops, and that these companies soon find themselves being sued by what Birnbaum called “frequent filers,” lawyers who make a living suing companies for violating laws against robocalls.
My heart bleeds for these smaller shops.  /sarc

3 comments:

Ted said...

The most annoying part of Robo Calls is when you answer and there is no one at the other end. This caused by the following .

The Robo dialer will dial 10 numbers, but it only has the ability to connect to 5 recorded anoucements. Most of time fewer than 5 calls are answered by a "live " person. But sometimes too many answer and these are just left hanging in space with you shouting into the phone.

matism said...

Why waste your time shouting into the phone, Ted? If I answer and there is no response from the other end in a short time, I hang up and block the number. My Panasonic cordless phone lets me block up to 250 numbers, and that feature is well used.

Of course, I also generally call screen, and if I don't recognize the caller and they don't leave a message, I don't answer at all.

Knucklehead said...

I got so tired of the phone ringing ten or twelve times a day with that nonsense that I bought a CPR V5000 (as in 5,000 pre-blocked numbers) call blocker. SO far 55 or so new ones have called over the past two months or so, but I just hit the big red "Block Now" button and they are added to the list. We're less than one/day now.