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:

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

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  3. 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.

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