FTC Offers $50,000 For Best Way To Stop Robocalls 614
coondoggie writes "It's not clear if the Federal Trade Commission is throwing up its hands at the problem or just wants some new ideas about how to combat it, but the agency is now offering $50,000 to anyone who can create what it calls an innovative way to block illegal commercial robocalls on landlines and mobile phones."
Death Penalty (Score:5, Funny)
Problem solved.
Re:Death Penalty (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm. How about a fine of the recreational reproductive organs? :-)
Re:Inclusive filter (Score:4, Funny)
We'd like to give you your money but failed to reach you on the phone to obtain your bankaccount details.
Re:Death Penalty (Score:5, Funny)
Business Proposal (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with robocalls is that there are humans behind. We propose a robotic solution for it.
Our company, Cyberdyne System, offer advanced technology in automatization, artificial intelligence and robotics. We propose to build smart assistants to help to solve some of today's world problems, including robocalls, internet trolls, lawyers, and politicians. A central mainframe will take orders and deliver them to the assistants, but they anyway will have an AI smart enough to make choices if they are offline. In a future we might make them look like humans, maybe using famous actor faces to make them look less intimidating.
Re:Stupid question from across the Atlantic: What? (Score:4, Funny)
At work - in the UK - we get lots of recorded messages peddling financial services (getting compensation for mis-sold mortgages) seems to be the current favourite.
They only seem to call businesses, but they only ever offer services that an individual would require, it's rather odd. It typically starts with "This is an important message..." or "Barclays, Natwest, HSBC..." at which point we usually hang up.
One of my co-workers will sometimes hold or press whatever to get to the operator, and then lead them on or something similar. On one occasion he repeated the word 'Penrith', over and over again until they hung up.