FCC hopes to shut down robocallers by publishing numbers weekly

Per Telecom Digest Moderator:

I can't even begin to see how it would work. I don't have firsthand knowledge, but the picture I have in my mind is of an extremely fluid environment. FCC publishes list.... Robocallers take the list and modify their fake CallerIDs to not include said numbers.... Probably takes all of, what?... a half hour ?

I could even spin it as an assist to the robocallers.... maybe keeping them a half-step ahead of services like NoMoRobo.

For my money, the most effective thing they could do is require all phone companies to include CallerID and Simultaneous Ring as part of their basic package - at no additional charge.

Failing that, set up "Honey Pot" situations where whoever is behind a robocall gets prosecuted once money changes hands.... but I would think that's awfully cost-intensive in an environment where much worse stuff is competing for budget dollars.

Exactly. They will simply fake caller-ID even more than they already do now. Recently I've gotten a few calls on my home phone "from" myself -- the caller ID displayed our own name and number exactly how it gets displayed on someone else's phone when I call them! I don't know who it was, I didn't answer and they didn't leave a message.

On the other end of the creativity scale are the telemarketers/scammers who use as a caller ID 000-000-0000.

The most frequent trick I've seen is to use the same NPA-NNX as mine, but not my line-number. I get the feeling there's som lord-of-telemarketing doing a maniacal laugh in his fortress of doom every time I answer one of those - until I've wasted five or ten minutes of the human's time and then said "I'm not interested. My number is on the do-not-call list, so don't call me again."

I don't know why, but they always say they can't do that.

Bill Horne Moderator

Agreed. What I think would work would be to rule that all carriers must reveal actual ANI to people on the list who complain about junk robocalls, or at least their lawyers, and that the callers must pay some statutory penalty large enough to make it worthwhile for the callees to pursue.

Per Telecom Digest Moderator -

When I answer the phone I do so in a soft, rapid voice.

If nobody responds within about a second or so - and/or the line has that distinctive "Dead" sound - I just hang up.

My theory is that there's a computer dialing thousands or hundreds of thousands phone numbers. When somebody picks up, the computer knows it and then starts listening for a human voice. Once it recognizes a human voice, it flips the call to a telemarketer who is not currently busy. The soft, rapid voice is not readily recognized by the computer.

Occasionally I wind up hanging up on somebody calling from a cell phone - for reasons I do not understand - but they usually call back and, if the phone rings again within a few seconds I'll go the whole route with "Hello, hello, is anybody there ?".

Like I said... that's strictly a theory and I know nothing about what is really going on... but it fits and mostly works.

The industry term for the computer is 'Predictive dialer'. The Wikipedia article is good enough to start on.

Lots of them also seem to be able to recognize the cadence of answering machine messages. I usually screen calls by letting the machine pick up (I have el-cheapo home phone service, no caller-ID or voicemail), and the robocalls often hang up during the greeting. Others hang up shortly after the beep without saying anything, so I guess they detect that.

If I do pick up, I have to say "Hello" a couple of times before it transfers me to the human.

Something I always wanted to do, but never actually got around to doing, is to change my outgoing message to something really short like "Leave a message." or even "Speak!" either without a beep, a beep with an oddball frequency or some sound that's not actually a beep, to fool the predictive dialers. I do think the predictive dialers do recognize the longish "We cannot come to the phone right now, so leave a message...BEEP!" sequence and hang up, while a short message with an odd "beep" may sound enough like a "Hello?" to it for it to summon a human telemarketer. The (sub)human then wastes their time spewing their canned spiel then "Hello, Mr. Smith? Hello? Hello?" before giving up.

Per Barry Margolin:

I have the SIT tone for "This is a non-working number" in the beginning of my answering machine's message. Dunno if it helps or not.... one might hope that robocalling applications would self-clean their lists based on SIT tones just to save dialing time.... but my gut says that's a stretch....

The most interesting robocall that I have gotten was a few weeks ago. I am 99% sure it was a computer, but the voice sounded surprisingly natural and it's response to what I said was logical.

I hung up reflexively... but now I wish I had stayed on the line to feel it out a little.

Kind of like

Whether I had that one right or not, I have to think that sort of thing will be deployed in force within a year or two.

I get LOTS of calls (which I never answer) to my cellphone from some scummy payday loan outfit. Different caller-id each time, so blocking the number is pointless. They always leave a message on voice mail. Usually the message restarts after about a second, and leaves a complete message instructing me to go to some website, as if it knows it's leaving a message and not talking to a live person. Occasionally, the beginning of the message is truncated (as if it started playing as soon as my VM greeting started), and instructs me to press 1 or 2, as if it thinks it's talking to a live person.

It seems likely that the robocaller usually figures out after a couple of seconds that it doesn't have a live person (maybe it catches the Voice mail "beep" interrupting its spiel), and switches to the message format that it uses for answering machines or voice mail. But sometimes it doesn't figure it out, and my VM picks up in the middle of its "live person" format.