Re: Scottish, uhm... uuh... what should we call this?

On Fri, 23 May 2008 22:46:27 -0000, steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steve Greenland)
wrote:

According to Steve VanDevender <stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
I've heard the idea that one should keep telemarketers on the phone for
as long as possible to reduce the number of other people they can call,

Caller: Hello, may I speak to Mrs. _Lastname_

Self: Sure, just a second.

Self now puts phone on counter and returns to what he was doing, since
anybody Self wanted to talk to would know there was no Mrs. _Lastname_
in the household...

Maybe a box with a button which inaudibly switches the caller to an
external service (freeing up the original line) where they get to chat
with a variety of audio LISAbots while their number (not just a Caller ID)
is extracted from the phone company. If a given number shows up more than
X times in the central database, it's added to a block list which the
consumer widget-with-button-on pulls down once a week or so. Calls from
numbers on that list then get auto-diverted to the service for a period of
time.

Results:

1) Making multiple calls from a given phone, which are then pegged as spam
by multiple people, results in all further calls from that number to _any_
box-equipped phone turning into long wastes of time and money.

2) Telemarketing becomes less profitable and more of a hassle, along with
being more difficult for newbies because they have to be trained to
distinguish between a real child whose parent might be able to be sold
something if they just hang on a few minutes, and a fake three-year-old
simulated by the service. Thus, the traditionally high turnover leads to
further inefficiency and it becomes another problem for the industry to
address.

3) The more boxes get sold, the wider the net becomes and the less likely
it is that a telemarketer will make it to a genuine sales prospect before
their number is silently locked out from the box-equipped population. Of
course, telemarketing companies can simply request more phone numbers, but
it's an additional expense and administrative hassle.

4) The nonpermanent nature of the lockout list means that "poisoned"
numbers will eventually drop off the list and become available for general
use again.

5) Box-users' phone lines will not be tied up with either telemarketing
calls or the countermeasures, which is really the purpose of the exercise.

6) Poisoning of genuine numbers would be difficult as it would require the
telemarketing industry to purchase a large number of boxes and phone lines
themselves, make a large number of phone calls of a certain duration, and
find a way to spoof phone company reporting of a given number. Not to
mention keeping it up for a subsequent period to make sure the block
didn't expire. And even then, they'd be trackable as the lookup data would
come from the phone company and all requests could be referred there.

Alternatively, they could try cycling through a large number of fresh
phone numbers and then releasing them to general use, but this would
simply mean the numbers became viable again shortly afterward and the
phone company would have some extra fees and charges for them.

7) A number which one person hit the button for accidentally wouldn't be
added to the blocklist as it would need more than a single incident. The
caller could simply hang up and call back.

8) Optionally, multiple hits from a single box-user could lead to a caller
being blocked only for that user...


It wouldn't just be telemarketing which could be blocked, of course. I
wonder what would hit the fan when it was discovered that political
autocalls and phone surveys were being mass-redirected to /dev/null?


-SteveD
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