AI That Annoys Telemarketers

http://gizmodo.com/todays-hero-made-an-ai-that-annoys-telemarketers-for-as-1756344562

by mhb • 10 years ago

216 184 10 years ago

ADRIANFR• 10 years ago

Here is what I have done many times when a telemarketer calls I listen to what he wants to sell, the I say: “Yes, I think I’ll be interested in this, can you hold on just a bit?” Then I put down the phone and let him wait. Many times, the caller was still waiting 5 minutes later.

pavel_lishin16• 10 years ago

I believe that some call center forbid, or heavily penalize, the workers for hanging up on a potential lead.

randycupertino8• 10 years ago

Some of them are paid/incentivized for their talk time, so the reps will be perfectly happy, in fact GLAD, to be put on endless hold, because they can mute their headset, kick back and talk to their friends while all the time their metrics look good and it looks like they're working.

Some of our reps at my old company would purposely change our AI to dial places like Medicare or social security so they could purposely get put on endless hold.

erokar• 10 years ago

Good job on making things worse for underpaid workers who in all probability also hate what they do.

tunesmith2• 10 years ago

I agree, this is pretty mean and funny at the same time. I think where it turns from mean to funny is about where we imagine ourselves a certain distance away from them. But I do remember a certain time where I got mad at a customer service rep and made some comments that were... a little too cutting, and I remember experiencing her react in a way that showed she was hurt and upset. It hit me hard and I haven't done that since.

Nutmog3• 10 years ago

But if you had only been polite, would you have gone away feeling frustrated or ripped off? There's a reason people are rude to customer service staff - it's to vent their frustrations at the company that's causing them grief, and thus feel more relieved themselves.

The job of the rep is to represent the company and that includes receiving gratitude as well as criticism, "I love you" as well as "you f*". Perhaps the problem is that there are people desperate enough to suffer abuse in exchange for money. We already solved similar issues protecting people from their own desperation with minimum wage and workplace safety laws so maybe we need a legally required "maximum personal abuse" requirement on employers to protect workers from this.

Spivak• 10 years ago

So if I hired someone to follow you around in public and gently but constantly poke you with a stick you would treat this person well simply because I was paying them? You're just happy they have a job?

At what point is a person responsible for their job/career? Regardless of whether it was a choice or not, if your job is to annoy, harass, and manipulate people, those people being angry and treating you like shit is just an occupational hazard.

hardwaresofton12• 10 years ago

Have some empathy. Regardless of how this person got to their decision, you may be justified in the right to be annoyed, but why not choose to be kind?

Also people complain about telemarketers so much, but how many calls are you really getting a day from them? Also, how many times has one really interrupted something important you were doing?

They're just sales people whose business meetings happen over the phone.

Yeah, you COULD treat your waiter like shit (angry customers are just an occupational hazard), but that's a shitty thing to choose to do, outside of extreme situations.

ljk• 10 years ago

interesting take, while i agree with @erokar's sentiment of not being unnecessarily malicious towards the telemarketer, in your scenario I'd probably call the cops after politely tell your employee to bug off :)

nshepperd• 10 years ago

If the alternative for that person is being homeless and starving, probably yeah. Or at least I wouldn't be pointlessly malicious toward them while fending them off.

wstrange3• 10 years ago

Telemarketers are intrusive, and most do not respect the do not call lists, or they find creative ways around it.

If they want to waste my time, I see no reason not to waste theirs.

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

I wouldn't be so quick to say they hate their job. A person with a financial incentive to do so can swallow any justification to be enthusiastic about their job. Not all of them will, naturally, but if I'm allowed to be crass, some whores actually like being whores.

tamana11• 10 years ago

Why are you talking about whores? Whores aren't trying to steal or hurt anyone.

dave20005• 10 years ago

We should probably feel sorry for them. In many ways, they're the victim. Actually, muggers too. I understand some of them came from broken homes and didn't have the same advantages you or I had. If you don't give muggers money they may decide they have no choice than to murder you, which will almost certainly provoke a turn for the worse in their lifes. Give all you can - they need it more than you.

Nutmog3• 10 years ago

In the 2nd recording on that page, the caller identified himself as a former soldier with PTSD. That sounds like someone who made a decision to take a high risk of ruining his life - and it happened. If you can't accept suffering mental illness and physical injury or death, then don't become a soldier.

gruez2• 10 years ago

Is there a self-hosted version of this for those of us without 3-way calling or long distance plans?

jobu• 10 years ago

He's had enough interest in the project that he decided to run a Kickstarter for it : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/202664225/the-jolly-rog...

Unfortunately a self-hosted option doesn't appear to be in the works, but maybe with enough feedback he'll add that.

dsr_• 10 years ago

Or a sip endpoint so that we can use a little cheap net bandwidth rather than expensive minutes.

gruez2• 10 years ago

There's a dummer implementation of this idea that does use a sip endpoint. https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/. Too bad it frequently goes down (due to abuse) and isn't as sophisticated as the OP.

metasean2• 10 years ago

And he gets to run a Turing test on his AI for each call, sorta like training AI through CAPTCHAS.

jonbaer• 10 years ago

To me this (somewhat) passes the Turing test no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test ... if only it had prerecorded context bits that could be recognized ...

Nutmog3• 10 years ago

No because the human doesn't expect that he might be talking to a machine. If he knew there was a 50% chance it was a machine then he'd find ways to recognize it - like its inability to follow the conversation at all.

stcredzero• 10 years ago

How about a service that uses a Siri-like voice recognition service to do one very limited context task: Screen your calls against telemarketers?

A lot of telemarketer outfits with trashy setups are already at a disadvantage: Their predictive dialers leave a huge gap of silence at the beginning of an answered call because they don't properly time their dialing with available operators. Such a service could learn the vocal characteristics of your family and friends and would probably do a great job with recognizing cues telemarketers produce unconsciously.

cballard2• 10 years ago

You don't really need something that complex. You can either:

1. Just don't answer any call if it's not in your address book, as I do if I'm not at a computer.

2. Do a Google search for the number, if your doctor, tailor, or dry cleaner doesn't come up, don't answer. Add these to your Address Book for the future.

Usually http://800notes.com/ or similar sites will come up for telemarketers, with many notes. If implementing #2 in software, it would make sense to go the other way, validating that a number probably is a telemarketer, instead of validating that it's something relevant to you (which would be harder).

pavel_lishin16• 10 years ago

I always pick up the phone, because I don't want to miss a call from a friend or a family member calling from jail, or a hospital, or a stranger's phone after they got in a wreck.

It's less of a concern now that nearly everyone has cellphones, but I'd rather not risk missing a call like that :/

IgorPartola• 10 years ago

I find that doctors offices often call from an unknown number. This is for privacy reasons: if a psych doctor calls and someone who doesn't know I am seeing one sees the caller ID, they would have violated my privacy. Also as a rule they don't leave voice mail messages beyond "this is Dr. So-and-so please call me back." Because of this I always answer all unknown numbers. If they turn out to be a telemarketer, I tell them they called the director of the FBI and ask them who they work for and how they got my number, then promise them to investigate their company because calling this secure line is a threat to national security.

hoodoof3• 10 years ago

Aren't telemarketers people who are just trying to get their bills paid?

Seems like bullying behaviour to be unkind to them.

A quick "no thanks" and hang up is enough.

hardwaresofton12• 10 years ago

Someone made a similar comment and was severely down-voted -- be an adult, say no thanks, and hang up the phone.

If you're being called extremely consistently at the same inconvenient time, then your case is extraordinary, take some measures to make sure the company doesn't call you again (no call list, whatever else) -- don't take your frustration out on the person who's turn it is to call you.

I stated this before, but if you think about it, telemarketers are just sales people who work over the phone. Even when they're being overbearing, no one treats sales people this shitty in person.

hoodoof3• 10 years ago

Telemarketers started off with blocked phone numbers, which I don't pick up anymore.

Now that they reveal their numbers I immediately block that number on my phone after I hang up the call.

slantyyz3• 10 years ago

> no one treats sales people this shitty in person.

We have "door knockers" where I live (Ontario, Canada) who present themselves as representatives of gas and energy companies (and some have even gone so far as to say they work for the government) who try and get you to show them your energy bill and/or try to get into your basement to give you a "free inspection" and then get you to sign up for something you don't want.

In my experience, saying "no thanks, not interested" (in person) just makes them more aggressive in their claims with the same scripted retorts- i.e. they're there in an official capacity (they're not), all the other neighbors let them sign up (probably not), they have a photo id (that anyone with computer skills can reproduce) and that they're there to save you money (doubtful).

They show up in my neighborhood every couple of months, and after a while, you sorta get worn out by the routine and find that being rude/abrupt is the easiest (and sometimes only) way to get rid of them.

dave20005• 10 years ago

If you're being called extremely consistently at the same inconvenient time, then your case is extraordinary, take some measures to make sure the company doesn't call you again (no call list, whatever else) -- don't take your frustration out on the person who's turn it is to call you.

There is a large group of people for whom there is literally no way of stopping them calling. That's the point you don't seem to understand. You're saying essentially "it's not their fault that they're illegally harassing you having taken steps to hide their identity so you can't report them". It's a moronic argument!

You're conflating "being an adult" with "meekly accepting that some people are going to phone you in the evening when you're relaxing with your family and try and bullshit you into giving them money without giving them a piece of your mind". All of the phone calls are inconvenient because they all waste my time; when are they ever not inconvenient?

You might just as well describe crack dealers as "businessmen, just after an honest buck".

ashark• 10 years ago

I stated this before, but if you think about it, telemarketers are just sales people who work over the phone. Even when they're being overbearing, no one treats sales people this shitty in person.

Sure they do, in similar situations like door-to-door sales. They're pushy, annoying, and coming to you, not the other way around. Often their whole business relies on screwing over old people. Anything that can be done to ensure they bug fewer people in a day is a public service.

dllthomas2• 10 years ago

I find myself called inconsistently at different times (often inconvenient, sometimes not), from different numbers, with the same pitch ("Free install of a home security system!").

I have told them I am ineligible (I don't own a home), that I am uninterested (satisfied with my current security situation), that I believe them to be a scam in the first place, and that I would prefer that they stop calling. I have asked to be removed from their list. I have asked to be put on their "do not call" list. I have submitted the numbers on the FCC web page. I still receive about 1-2 calls a month from them. Their EV from calling me is zero (or negative, if I manage to track them down). If they are really interested in wasting their time, they can do it without wasting mine as well.

tomjen32• 10 years ago

I smell astro-turfing from a telemarketing firm here.

bcook7• 10 years ago

Not taking it personally is healthy for people on both sides of the phone-line.

I tend to just hang-up without saying a thing. I highly doubt they take it personally. If they are bothered by it, they are not going to last long as a telemarketer anyway.

hoodoof3• 10 years ago

Also the call is often given away by the slight delay and sometimes music whilst their computer hands the outbound call to an operator. There's the signal to hang up.

Blackthorn• 10 years ago

If I'm on the no-call list already and am getting called, the person on the other end deserves Lenny.

bcook7• 10 years ago

Apologies for being overly critical, but I think the boss or the company deserve much more wrath than the poorly-paid telemarketing person you actually talk to.

randycupertino8• 10 years ago

The person you're actually speaking to has no control over actually calling you- they're just logged into their desk which their bosses at the company code up to an autodialer, so as soon as they log into their desk it starts calling you.

Just tell them, "please add me to your do not call list" (magic words!) and they can put you in their software as DNC.

auntienomen• 10 years ago

The point is that wasting telemarketer's time makes their business economically unviable. There are less antisocial ways of making ends meet.

EC1• 10 years ago

Yeah, so don't seek jobs at shitty places. Yeah yeah yeah the whole "beggars can't be choosers thing". Unless the telemarketer is literally your only option whatsoever, then I'm sure you have a choice of flipping burgers.

MicroBerto• 10 years ago

How is this "bullying"? Let's not get carried away with this word. This isn't Tumblr.

That out of the way, y'all need to stop giving your phone numbers out to everyone. Google Voice is incredible for a very good reason.

pavel_lishin16• 10 years ago

I believe they still receive an hourly wage. Their bills get as paid as they ever did.

brokentone3• 10 years ago

I'm on the Do Not Call list, so they are actually criminals. They're offering debt services (which I don't need) which I assume are a scam. Any moment I'm wasting of their time is a moment they're not scamming someone else.

randycupertino8• 10 years ago

So there's the national do not call list which doesn't work that well, then each company has their own internal Do Not Call list. If you ask the person calling you to add them to their DNC they will and the calls will stop.

dave20005• 10 years ago

Yes, but I don't care about them in any way because of the way in which they've chosen to get their bills paid.

A quick "no thanks" gets them on the way to harassing the next person. And we don't want that, do we?

I don't actually believe you really give a shit about telemarketers pay at all; i've read other people say the same thing as you and it just doesn't sound convincing at all.

It's like when people say "well, you have to respect other people's beliefs". No...no, you don't. There's no persuasive argument for that assertion whatsoever. I accept that they hold those beliefs - like I accept the reality that some people can "offer" other members of society nothing other than the ability to make phone calls on other people's behalf. for profit, to people who don't want to receive them but who have no technical or legal way of preventing them - but I'd rather they didn't. There should be an opt-in list you have to sign up to to receive random phone calls at home from people hawking tat and services you don't need, and anyone doing this when you're not on the list should end up with a fine/jail sentence, but until that happens I'm going to waste as much of their time as possible.

username2233• 10 years ago

A quick "no thanks" and hang up is enough.

A quick "sorry, he recently passed away" is just as fast, and probably reduces future telemarketing.

On the one hand, the callers are humans with dehumanizing jobs who probably just want to have a non-awful conversation for a few minutes before returning to the auto-dialer to get rejected yet again. On the other hand, they get fired for not making their numbers, and their managers listen in on their calls to make sure they keep pushing the hard sell. On balance, I tend to go for polite, quick refusal. I wouldn't mind chatting for a few minutes, but they would probably get in trouble for that.

tamana11• 10 years ago

Nothing wrong with them getting fired -- it opens a job for someone else who was unemployed. The net effect is the same average wages paid into the labor force.

mikeash• 10 years ago

I'm sure scam artists and burglars are just trying to pay the bills too. If you choose to do something so anti-social, then sometimes you'll have trouble.

cabalamat• 10 years ago

A quick "no thanks" and hang up is enough.

No, because then they get to annoy the next person.

The more of their time your waste, the less profitable it becomes, and the fewer telemarketers there will be. Wasting their time is a public service.

saretired• 10 years ago

Wait, you think these scammers--they are not telemarketers--believe they work for Microsoft or Amex and don't know they are lying? We're supposed to be polite to criminals?

gherkin02• 10 years ago

It can even detect when a telemarketer is getting suspicious, triggering a completely inane response that usually convinces them otherwise.

How does it do that? Does it have some sophisticated voice recognition that can pick up on emotional reactions? Or does it just jump into them on a schedule that's calibrated to when someone would likely start to be annoyed?

The "yeah uh-huh" stuff seemed pretty straightforward: it sounds like just shoots them off whenever there was enough silence to imply the telemarketer was waiting for a response.

pavel_lishin16• 10 years ago

Where's the cruelty? This robot isn't calling them names; it's not insulting them. The worst you could say about it is that it's wasting their time.

But it's not even wasting their time as much as they're wasting mine. Never - not once - has a telemarketer call been something I would remotely be interested in. But they get paid for their time, while mine evaporates into the aether.

That's even assuming the best case scenario - that they're cold-calling me for a product I may conceivably benefit from. What about all the scammers? What about those who call up the elderly, and continue to try to sell them hard, even if it's obvious that the person on the other end should not be making financial decisions?

Maybe we should turn off spam filters to stop wasting the time of those who write the poorly worded viagra and aluminum siding ads.

LeifCarrotson2• 10 years ago

Inthe end, it's all about money - and wasting the time of the person being paid to call you is wasting the money of the person paying them.

Turning off spam filters will have no effect on the time of the person writing them. Thanks to the magic of computers, when the message is written once, it can be sent as many times as necessary, with a much smaller incremental cost than a human on a phone. The cost to a spammer to send a message that bounces off a spam filter is actually higher (due to the need to buy/find open/vulnerable STMP relays when their reputation falls or they're blacklisted) than to send mail that is delivered, so keep those spam filters on!

username2233• 10 years ago

Can you go into more detail? For my personal mail, my default approach is to toss spam client-side (via automatic filters or otherwise), so the spammer gets no signal about whether or not it is delivered. Does reducing the reputation of their relays hurt them much more? If so, which mail hosts support doing this?

bcheung• 10 years ago

This could be dangerous depending on what the telemarketer is saying.

TM: Would you to know more? Bot: Yes.

TM: Do we have your permissions to record this conversation. Bot: Uh huh.

TM: Do you agree to the charge of $123.45? Bot: Yes, sounds good.

pavel_lishin16• 10 years ago

Who would the telemarketer charge? I don't think you can initiate a charge to a phone number unless the number itself calls someone, can you?

zo1• 10 years ago

If it's from your provider, yes, they absolutely can. Because on their side, the number links to a "specific person/account", and they will charge to that, or add the service to that.

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

They can't actually charge you unless they have payment information. Which you obviously wouldn't give to the bot.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 10 years ago

I will pay $20 for this iPhone app. Take my damned money.

wstrange3• 10 years ago

This would be perfect for the "This is Microsoft Windows calling" scams.

You know the one - a dude with a very thick Indian accent who wants you to install some program to "fix" your PC.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Even better, rather than an AI you outsource the talking to someone who has nothing better to do with their time and a mobile phone. Pay them a graduated scale depending on how long they kept the caller on the phone.

dave20005• 10 years ago

I used to pass the phone to my daughter and told her to mimic his accent, ask silly questions like "where's my pizza" etc. It's the little things that make life worthwhile, isn't it?

wstrange3• 10 years ago

These scammers called my 88 year old father, and managed to talk him in to attempting to install some malware.

He isn't terribly computer literate, and Windows confuses the heck out of him (switched him to Chromebooks - so much better, but I digress).

Anyhow, after spending almost an hour with him, they hung up in frustration - as he could not follow their directions to get the malware installed.

So Windows is secure after all.

dhimes• 10 years ago

I first heard of Tom Mabe on the radio when the morning show ("Kirk, Mark and Lopez") out of Baltimore played some of his bits on the air. He would prank the telemarketers ("Hey, I'm glad you called. (Darkly:) You wouldn't know how to get blood out of a carpet, would you? I've got a lot of blood here..."). He had some of them going quite a while- in a really quite funny way.

gregmac• 10 years ago

This is very similar to 'Lenny', a script someone developed for Asterisk systems. It looks like the original website is down, but there's still a FreePBX module[1], a youtube channel with many, many call recordings[2], as well as several other forums posts/etc I won't bother to link. There used to be a hosted service you could forward calls to as well.

The Lenny script's brilliance was its simplicity. Basically, it just waited for silence, then played back one of several clever lines recorded by a confusing-sounding old man. He'd ask the caller to repeat because he couldn't hear, divert questions by asking "Sorry, who did you say you were calling from again?" and tell long stories about his daughters then say "oh sorry, what was your question again?".

Note, I appreciate the cleverness and social engineering aspect of this, but I don't use it myself. I do have a blacklist on my home phone, but it only goes to a 'not in service' tone, and I've only ever added 4 numbers to it (one in particular was some guy that told me wife to "f* off" when she said she wasn't interested).

[1] https://github.com/lgaetz/freepbx-Its_Lenny [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO...

thaddeusmt• 10 years ago

On the topic of Lenny, "who" is great, if you want to just listen to one recorded Lenny call to get a sense for how it plays out (and have a laugh too), in this particular one a car crashes into the building where the telemarketer is working, adding to the strangeness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lL870ixdsY

nchelluri• 10 years ago

this is exactly what i thought of when i read this article.

just heard this lenny convo ~last week as i saw it posted on reddit. told my coworkers about it as well :)

edit: here's a great link about the video, with the bonus of giving subreddit info: https://np.reddit.com/r/itslenny/comments/40ul71/telemarkter...

randycupertino8• 10 years ago

Fun anecdote time Lenny and even this new Jolly Roger AI- it's not just the telemarketers who are being scammed, some of them are using Lenny to do the scamming to get around their employers rules and get out of having to do real work.

At a previous startup I worked at, we had an outbound call center with 500 reps who were incentivized by their talk time- the amount of time they spent on outbound calls.

We found about 5 sneaky agents who would purposely call Lenny and sit on the call doing nothing, doing their nails, reading their kindle to keep their metrics up and high and look like they were doing their jobs well (and winning monthly contest incentives that would give them small bonuses or extra PTO) instead of calling real customers.

I always wondered if the people who designed Lenny know about how some reps purposely call them to keep their own metrics up. Like, they think they are sticking it to the telemarketer, but really the telemarketer WANTS to screw around and take forever on the call so their performance bonus increases.

Once we caught on to this, the company changed the metrics around to number of unique outbound calls. But then the reps also figured out a way to game that. There were even a few of them who figured out a way to set up dummy numbers and they would basically call their friends, or even EACH OTHER at the call center, and sit on the call with their friends instead of calling the call center. I could never really blame these reps, it was such a crappy soul sucking job and I gotta say behind the scenes I was always impressed with their ingenuity to try and get around the metrics. These reps were making $11 an hour and had to clock out even to use the bathroom (illegal practice that the company just broke the law on).

I'm so glad I left that place, it was such a toxic atmosphere.

nl• 10 years ago

I suspect that the authors of Lenny would think that was the best possible outcome. Stop a telemarketer annoying people AND wasting the money their employers? Sounds like a pretty good outcome.

noir_lord• 10 years ago

Read a piece years ago that said you should be very careful what targets you set in business as people will inevitably optimise/game the system them for those targets.

I've seen this play out at multiple places with staff all the way up to are managment/director level.

PKop• 10 years ago

Wouldn't this be sticking it to the company though? Wasted unproductive phone calls hurt the bottom line and produce no sales, and as you mentioned the employees running this scam get bonuses, so costs go up.

What could be better to hurt the company than that?

In other words, the goal here is to disincentize spammy calls from businesses.

Causing telemarketing to be less profitable and more costly is a good way to achieve that, so this tool being used by "both sides" is a good thing.

Estragon• 10 years ago

  > had to clock out even to use the bathroom (illegal practice that the company just broke the law on).

Assuming you're in the US, what's the relevant law?

bambax• 10 years ago

What I do is put the call on speaker and pass the receiver to my four-year-old son, who's super excited that someone wants to speak with him.

It transforms an annoying experience into an entertaining one.

jbandela1• 10 years ago

Sounds awesome! All around win. You change the economics of telemarketing by keeping them on the line while also doing some parent-child bonding as you are enjoying a shared activity together.

brokentone3• 10 years ago

I've been getting so many calls lately, I've been playing music for them lately, trying to waste their time, hoping that they will take my number off whatever list it's on... I really wish there was a way to waste more of their time. Thus far, all I've determined is that they don't like Ace of Base.

randycupertino8• 10 years ago

They might actually start calling you more because the reps get incentivized by talk time, so getting a chance to chill and listen to music instead of actually having to talk to people and try to sell scam things people don't want to buy is a refreshing change for them.

Realize those reps hate their lives, hate their jobs and are probably getting $11 an hour in some crappy hell hole trying to make $$ to feed their kids... it's not a job anyone WANTS to be doing and they really don't WANT to be bothering you, they are just forced to by their employers.

If you don't want the calls, just say, "Please put me on your do not call list, thank you and have a nice day" and then hang up. Asking for the DNC is crucial- the words "DO NOT CALL" is the magic phrase that will get them to put your # into the blocked list of the autodialer. Some scammier telefirms won't actually add you to their DNC list if you say "stop calling me" it has to be the phrase "add me to your do not call list."

Also if you just hang up on them without saying anything, the software will automatically add your number back into the queue to reattempt you again and again sometimes within days. Our outbound autodialer software used to recall people who didn't answer and also everyone who sent the reps straight to voicemail. The autodialer basically throws everyone back in to get endless calls in perpetuity until you pick up and the rep talks to you. And in a big shop where you've got 500 reps making 200-250 outbound calls per day, they can try you 1x a week forever.

So if you really don't want ANY more telemarketing calls ever, stay on the line until the rep comes on, then say "please add this number to your do not call list, thank you, goodbye."

tomjen32• 10 years ago

If they call back can you sue them?

tamana11• 10 years ago

It's cute how you think international criminals obey US law.

maxerickson2• 10 years ago

People seem to have varying success, but I find that any even semi-legitimate companies will stop calling if you answer and ask to be put on their do not call list.

It can be necessary to talk over their opening spiel.

This is in the US for a number that is already on the national do not call list (which has lots of exceptions); I don't make threats or argue or anything sophisticated, just "Please put this number on your do not call list." Then hang up.

asddddd2• 10 years ago

This never worked for me when I was receiving wrong-number collections calls, they would just hang up and call back the next day. What did work was hanging up, calling the number back, and asking to be added to their do not call list.

js2• 10 years ago

I use Anveo as my VoIP provider. They have a neat web-based call flow tool. My line is setup so that if you're not ona white list, you get a recording asking you to press a digit, else the call goes to voice mail. This has gotten rid of all telemarketing calls. Maybe 1 in 10 even make it to voice mail (most hang up first).

But anyway, Anveo has had a "robotalk" feature for years, though I dunno how much AI it has.

pfista• 10 years ago

The calls I get usually start by the telemarketer asking to speak to the owner. I say she isn't available and they always hang up right after that.

anotherevan• 10 years ago

Telemarketers I tend to just say, "No thanks" and hang up on them. They are in a crap job, probably forced into it my circumstance, so the compassionate side of me doesn't want to abuse them.

The argument that wasting their time will ultimately make it uneconomical for those who employ telemarketers is an interesting one, although I doubt we'd get enough critical mass to make a difference. Implementing a basic income so people don't _have_ to work as telemarketers would be better for society as a whole.

On the other hand, the calls from, "Microsoft Security" are actively trying to harm me, so I'll waste their time all I can, delaying their opportunity with the next person.

joezydeco• 10 years ago

Having worked a telemarketing job back in my high-school days, I was grateful for the hang ups. We had quotas on calls completed and sales made, so letting us move on to the next household was a good thing.

curiousGambler• 10 years ago

As someone who worked as a telemarketer during college to pay for his degree so he could understand things like AI... Thank you!

Being a telemarketer sucks. The work environment is often toxically focused on metrics, turnover is high, and nobody wants to bother people at home!

Sadly it paid much better than most other jobs available to me at the time, especially once I got half decent at it and starting earning commission, so I don't think things this will ever make it uneconomical for employers.

bufordsharkley• 10 years ago

I worked doing telephone surveys for a summer. It could really wear on you when people weren't polite. (And simply saying "No thanks" and hanging up was polite enough.)

People who hung up right off, workers tended to say (to the disconnected line), "I'm sorry, I believe the call got cut off. I'll set you up for auto-reply every five minutes..."

stevewillows• 10 years ago

Instead of annoying these poor telemarketers, I'd rather have some software play a decent stand-up routine before declining the invitation to participate in whatever their service is.

I can only assume that the telemarketer's day sucks enough without this type of software in play.

noname123• 10 years ago

Re:how a comedian (Seinfeld) responds to telemarketer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hllDWSbuDsQ

BWStearns2• 10 years ago

Love this! Almost fell off my chair laughing. Reading through the comments I saw some tender souls among us feel that Jolly Roger's kindly enticement to go on speaking is cruel, and wondered if there was a more humane way. I kept seeing the issue of the "What company is this? .... click" scenario. Given that there's a fairly high likelihood that the line callers for these guys are fairly gullible and/or cheaply greedy, as well as unlikely to be long term employees, I'm wondering if you could get one to flip on their bosses and provide a real location/target for the promise of $[500-1000?] to a PayPal account (of course it wouldn't be paid, fuck 'em they're scammers). I'm trying it next time one of them calls. Granted it doesn't accomplish the initial goal of being more humane, but good intentions and all that.

Edit: You can apparently be awarded $1500 in private action against an entity calling you if you're on the DNC list. For social engineering purposes maybe promise to split it with the representative and suggest that s/he might be personally on the hook for money if they don't help?

tamana11• 10 years ago

You wonder why you can't convince a scammer to give you valuable info in exchange for a fake promise to pay? You can noodle that out.

BWStearns2• 10 years ago

Close but not really what I said. I speculated that it is possible to do so, I didn't wonder why one couldn't. Think about who is calling you. The people working those phones aren't and never will be Kevin Mitnick. They're poorly educated, morally apathetic, have no real options, are unlikely to be employed at the same place in a few weeks anyways, and may in fact be being scammed by the people running the operation as well. People fitting that profile are prone to believing that they've gotten/will get lucky despite the evidence, see lotteries. They're basically indistinguishable from their ideal marks.

Also, yeah supervisors might be listening to the call/the call is recorded, but it would be uneconomical to monitor them all live all the time. Any attempt to turn them would hinge on their expectation that their remaining time at the gig is going to earn less than what they expect to get from you. If you can convince them that they could make $1500 now, that's a month's salary for them. If they expect to be fired tomorrow then even a chance that you're telling the truth starts looking worth it.

MrQuincle• 10 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but has telemarketing always been going on in the States? Does it depend on the State? Why does the register not work? Is there no organisation that hands out fines? What's going on that you can not protect yourself against intrusion in your own home/life?

mirimir• 10 years ago

VoIP that's very hard to trace is the problem. And it's not unique to the US.

sdfin• 10 years ago

I thought the same. Where I live there's a register where you can suscribe, and if telemarketers call you then the company can be fined. Isn't there in USA such a thing?

Even if somebody calls using VoIP, they will mention their products, so I don't know why that would be an obstacle to identifying them.

pandaman• 10 years ago

"Telemarketer" nowadays means just anybody making annoying calls. I don't remember when was last time somebody who actually wanted to sell something has called. All the calls I am getting now are either asking for donations (which are exempt from do-not-call law, being a "charity"), doing a "survey" (also exempt) or are from criminals helping with my "credit card debt" , from "Windows security", from "IRS" etc. I imagine the criminals, already breaking more serious laws, would ensure they are not vulnerable to the do-not-call.

goodcanadian• 10 years ago

Telemarketing has existed a long time in the States. There is a national do not call list, and it works pretty well. However, scammers don't respect it, so you'll still occasionally get calls. Also, businesses with a "previous relationship" can call you. I once had to threaten a car dealer with legal action to get them to stop calling (I had test driven a car). A related problem I had was that I got a phone number that formerly belonged to a deadbeat. There were constant calls from debt collectors. It took about two years to convince them that they had the wrong number. Well, actually, most of them were pretty good because they can get in a lot of legal trouble if they harass the wrong person, but then the company would sell the debt to another company, and the calls would start again.

vitd• 10 years ago

What happens now is that legit companies are not calling anymore. It's only scammers. What they do is use a PBX or Voice Over IP system where they can set the caller ID themselves. When they call someone, they create a new number (sometimes daily, sometimes per call) that appears to be in your area code. So you report them to the Do Not Call registry, but the number is bogus, so the Feds have no way of knowing who actually called you or who to fine. If you ask who the company is on a call they'll either hang up on you or give a generic name like "Carpet Cleaners".

fishnchips• 10 years ago

This is inhumane. I don't like being cold-called but I really feel sorry for the lads and lasses doing it. I've been extremely lucky to have had the privilege in life that allowed me to receive good education, land a sequence of ever better jobs and build up skills that allow me do things I enjoy and get paid infinitely more than I deserve. Trolling folks that due to no fault of theirs were much less lucky in their lives is as ambitious as trolling my two year old son but way, way more cruel.

frik• 10 years ago

Have you even read the article and watched the videos? Hint: watch the videos and read the intro text...

lispm• 10 years ago

In what way is 'AI' involved?

DoctorBit• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the "Telecrapper 2000" from a long time ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A

http://myplace.frontier.com/~pumamanor/

petegrif• 10 years ago

I have a solution to telemarketers that I have found to be extremely effective. No matter what they say you reply "That's very interesting, please tell me more." Ideally you should do this in a flat monotone. They rarely make it past 3 or 4 opening gambits.

mangeletti• 10 years ago

I called the robot's number, added a second call to the robot's number, then merged the calls and muted myself. It was pretty hilarious.

mavdi• 10 years ago

Haha this is genius, now add a premium rate number to that and profit.

delinka• 10 years ago

"It’s absolutely brilliant when it works flawlessly." Ain't it the truth? This is said of my own software creations.

Though, to be honest, they seldom work flawlessly.

jpatokal• 10 years ago

I've always liked the telemarketing counterscript: http://egbg.home.xs4all.nl/counterscript.html

AI That Annoys Telemarketers

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