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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > The solution to spam calls is the same one I've advocated for years:
answer the call, and do everything you can to waste the time of a
> real human. Everything else is just talk, but the warm bodies have
> to be paid with real money, and if even a small percentage of
> victims fought back, the industry would be out of business inside a > year.
I have a couple of questions. I have an Asterisk node with around
900 PSTN DIDs coming into it, and as a result, I get a fair volume of calls from random numbers. *Sometimes*, by sheer luck, they happen to pick one of the numbers that rings one of my telephones. Usually I'm not there, but I find out about it later while trawling the logs.Anyhow, I wanted input on the following suggestions:
- Playing an ear-splitting loud milliwatt tone to verified spam callers. (perhaps using VOLUME(TX)=10 in Asterisk).
- Obviously wasting their time is good, but that also wastes your time - what about sending such calls to Lenny, or a variation thereof? Perhaps recording numerous common prompts one would use to waste a telemarketer's time, and then setting it up so every call is different, in a way that wouldn't immediately let them know they were "talking to a machine"
I wouldn't do either of these automatically, so as not to punish valid callers. But perhaps if I setup an easy way to transfer obvious spam calls to an extension that did one of these, it could be practical.