TeleZapper - A Way to Avoid Telemarketers?

VeniDormi asks: "While watching TV on my TiVo, I actually stopped to see an ad for a device called 'The TeleZapper', which claims to foil tele-marketers by convincing their auto-dialers that your number has been disconnected. The FAQ is light on technical details, only mentioning that the device 'emits [a] tone briefly when the line is answered'. I'm hoping Slashdotters with more telecommunications expertise can enlighten me as to: how/if this might work and whether or not it is something I could reproduce with a sound card, say for recording at the beginning of my voicemail message. Could it be as simple as playing back the three shrill tones I hear when I dial a wrong number?" Ah, the telephone equivalent to SPAM. Too bad phones don't have the equivalent of procmail filters.

What's the point?

[aliebrah]

Wouldn't it just be a lot easier if, for example, when you hear a telemarketer on the phone just say "get bent" and then hang up on them?

Seems like a much less troublesome and a much more effortless solution to me! :)

This will work great! (for about a week)

[nyquist_theorem]

It should be a simple software fix to upgrade the telemarketer's systems to search for something beyond that simple tone - even recognizing the entire "the number you have reached has been disconnected" speech pattern would be pretty simple I would think.

A better solution would involve telepone companies getting involved - say you get such a call, you could dial *TELEMARKETER or something, and the number that just called you would be added to a blacklist - when enough people blacklisted the number, that number would be prevented from making outgoing calls for a set period of time.

Ahh, if only the telephone companies didn't make so much money off telemarketers, think of how quickly they would be gotten rid of.

(naive mode off) oh wait... we still have spam... scratch that last bit of wishful thinking then.

Re:My solution to telemarketers

[nanojath]

Hey mensa, is it, like, a joke that you've mispelled tolerance in your sig?

OH CRAP

[Drunken_Jackass]

Ok, Ok, I admit it - i work for a telemarketing company. There, you happy?! I do it begrudgingly to support my "habit". Anyway, we use a number of methods, one of which being a predictive dialer running on SCO.

Our dialer has the ability to detect tritones - the "doo dee dii, the number you have reached...". There are several different tritones, and our dialer can distinguish between a "Changed Number" tritone, and a "Bad Number" tritone. I suppose that if this device sends out a tritone that matches the "Bad Number" tritone, our dialer wouldn't call it. You can, however, set your dialer to do whatever you like with those "dispositions". An unscrupulous company may set their dailer to pass those calls to the reps instead of dropping the line (We don't do that).

However, i happened to catch that commercial too, and it also says that it "...will automatically delete your name from their database". Of course, that's horse shit. It'll just dispo your record as bad number, what the company does with those is up to them.

Naturally i encourage everyone to check out their states' Do Not Call registry and add your name if you don't want to be disturbed (BTW, the laws about DNC'ing don't apply to things like election polling and charitable organizations - funny huh?)

So that's that!

Re:How it works

[dachshund]

See this page [dialogic.com] for a table of frequencies and durations of "SIT" tones.

Good luck.

Why this wouldn't work

[rumpledstiltskin]

I used to work in a call center for my school. we were outsourced to one of the larger fundraising organizations in the US. We did have an autodialler of sorts, but the determination of whether a number was bad, disconnected, busy, etc. was made by us. you clicked a choice on your screen. (most) people are a little smarter than the telezapper

Try to get the telemarketers to quit

[wayne]

When I have time, and I get a telemarketer, I try to get them to quit their job.

Remember, these are real people with feelings and they like to be treated like humans. I always ask for their name and ask if they ever get really rude comments when they call people. Normally, they say they do, and then I ask them if they understand why people are rude to them. Usually they start dancing around the issue of how their actions are the cause of other people being rude to them, and you have to firmly but politly talk to them about the issue. Tell them that you don't think they are they are the type of person who likes to be rude to people. You can also ask them how they feel about getting telemarketers at their home.

They will often bring up the subject how "this is just my job". To this, you have to explain that everyone is responsible for their own actions. Ask them if their employer asked them to steal from somone or to hurt someone, would they do it?

You can also bring up why so many of their coworkers quite after such a short period of time. Obviously, other people realize that what they are doing is wrong. The reason why the pay is "high" (for unskilled labor, but I don't say that) is because so few people want to be yelled at all day long.

Try to keep mentioning their name, try to connect with them. Try to get inside their minds and find their soft spots.

If nothing else, you have made the telemarketers waste a lot of time on a long distance call.

the racket

[operagost]

Isn't that like a protection racket? You used to (back in the ol PE6-5000 days) pay the phone company to have your name listed. This was handy, you could tell people, "Look me up in the book!" Then you had to pay Ma Bell to NOT put you in the book. Now, being unlisted isn't enough to keep the Telco monopolies from selling off your private information. They want $3/month (to compensate for lost revenue, I assume). I suppose that eventually, you'll have to pay them to secure your DSL connection, or else they'll let Microsoft come in and disable your expired copy of Windows XP and McDonalds pop up Big Mac ads in the middle of your web page.

Re:simple solutions also work

[mdpowell]

A simple solution for me is to have an *extremely* short answering machine message: "Please leave a message at the tone" said very quickly. My answering machine message is so short that the tele-spamming autodialiers don't recognize it as a machine and go ahead and connect to the telemarketer instead of disconnecting.

For a few months the result was a lot of messages saying "Hello . . . Hello . . . Are you there?" But the telemarketers then think it is a "broken" line, take the number off the list, and soon there are fewer telemarketers.

Simple and free.

Some details on this sort of thing are at http://www.scn.org/~bk269/bug.html

--mdp

Re:Adam, this wont work and here's why:

[Lish]

That's wierd. I can understand wanting a local number, because they shouldn't have to call long distance to reach you. Yes, they can tell if it's a local number, and if they want, they can figure out if it's a cell number or not. But there's no reason to care as long as it's a local call. I mean, would they rather have you give them a cellular number, or a friend's landline number?

Did they have a legit reason for wanting a landline number, or was it "just because"? For that matter, why would you not have a cell number that was local?

Interesting. Maybe it's your area; anywhere I've lived, everyone wants a contact number where you can be reached, but nobody cares (or asks) what kind of number it is. My old roommate gave out her cell number for everything, which was not a local call, but since she was never home anyway it made more sense to call her phone. Heck, some people here (broke-college-student town), don't have a phone at all; as long as you can give a number where they will be able to get a hold of you, that's good enough.

Re:How it works

[madcow_ucsb]

Not Toronto, but a couple places like that. As I recall they were trying to do that in the Bay Area a while back but I seem to remember they backed off after a lot of pissed off people complained.

I'm a lazy American. Why should I have to push 4 more buttons because of poorly designed systems? If I only push 7, it should assume that the first 4 are like the first 4 of the number I'm calling from, like it's done for years. If I want it to use a different area code, I'll explicitly tell it, like I've always done before. It seems quite simple to me...

Re:I use PacBell's Privacy Manager

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to do that too, but then I realized those telemarketers are often people struggling in dead-end jobs for lousy pay, and yelling at them makes their already dismal days that much worse.

When my girlfriend got laid off from her job a year ago, she took a telemarketing gig for awhile because she couldn't find anything else that would pay her rent. She was so miserable from people "venting" at her (she was a very nice person and not used to having to brush off personal insults yelled at her over the phone), she'd have to choke back tears between phone calls -- dozens an hour to make her quota -- long enough to put on her cheery, happy voice. It was a shitty, terrible job that sent her into a six-month depression, but some guys at the other end of the phone probably got a good laugh out of telling her off.

I'm not telling you your business, but a lot of the people at the other end of the phone are just trying to make a miserable buck. While they may be "part of the problem," they're not really the root of it.

Although, for the record, I despise telemarketers as much as anyone, maybe more than most. But my personal experience keeps me from unloading on them like I used to.

Privacy Manger is extortion

[PD]

1) You get phone service from phone company
2) Phone company sells your information to other companies.
3) You tell phone company to make your number unlisted.
4) Phone company sells your information anyway.
5) Telemarketers start calling you.
6) You get "unknown caller blocking" and caller ID to stop telemarketers.
7) The phone company sells a service to the telemarketers that allows them to get around the unknown caller blocking.
8) You're getting telemarketing calls again, so PacBell says to you: pay us some money and we'll protect you from those telemarketers.
9) You send them their $3 a month and you're safe again, until the next time PacBell sells the telemarketers a service to let them get around the privacy manager.

It's a fucking extortion racket.

Re:I use PacBell's Privacy Manager

[nahdude812]

There is always a person on the other end of the phone. A person has feelings. Yes, some of them need a job NOW or they lose their house, and telemarketing can pay well enough to prevent that from happening, unlike a lot of other menial dead-end jobs, like burger flipping. Telemarketing has decent pay because no one wants to do it. Do you think the person calling you is sitting on the other end of the phone thinking "SWEET, I woke him up from a nap!" I'm guessing there are probably a few like that, but I think they'd be the far minority.

If you've never been out of a job, looking, and needing money yesterday to buy food and pay bills, you simply can't comprehend what that's like. If you're threatened with homelessness, you'll take jobs like this, and they suck. They suck bad. They suck bad because of people like that. Are you allowed to be upset that they're bothering you at home? Yes, of course you are. Are you allowed to vent at them? Yes, of course you are. But should you at least take a minute to think that the person on the other end of the phone may not be any more happy about having to bother you at home than you are to be bothered? Yes, you should.

Don't like being bothered by them while you're at home? Politely say "I'm not interested, please remove me from your list." It has exactly the same effect as emotionally breaking them down, because you know what? The person you're speaking to isn't the owner of the telemarketing company, the owners, and source of the problem are completely insulated from this because they're sitting in their offices with their blinds drawn, wondering if it would be more effective to get a large bald shirtless guy in there beating an onorous rhythm on a drum. Don't think to yourself "I wasn't really that terrible, just swore at him/her a few times," because if all you do all day is take a small amount of abuse repeatedly, it will break you down.

Don't assume that because you've never been in that situation, that others don't have to be. Don't think that because you have skills and talents to market that will be snatched up immediately, making you never in need of a job that other people have the same advantage. You hear the horror stories of IS related job hunts. People looking for *gasp* 6 to 10 months!! Guess what? That's still better than a lot of industries where that could well be considered a short job search! Try to find a terratology or zoology job, and you'll know what a long job search is. And in five years, when there's a honest glut of competent computer technicians, and you're spending 18 months looking for a job, do you seriously think that you'd rather starve to death living on the streets than telemarket? Placed in that situation, you'll be there filling out a job application just to stay alive. Don't know if you have kids, but I'll tell you that when I do, there isn't a job in the world I wouldn't take to make their and my wife's life as good as possible. When it's a choice between my whole family starving, or being the scuba diver who scrubs the bottom of septics with a toothbrush, I'll use my own if I have to.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't make it wrong.