there is a potential downside to this kind of action.
i nuked a scam caller once with a killer deez nutz joke. the guy went bonkers when he realized. i think it was ligma or bofa or something. that day i won a battle.
since then i receive 25+ calls a day. i had to enable call blocking from unknown numbers. unfortunately i sometimes have to disable this feature when expecting calls.
you may win a battle and walk away with a cool war story but you will lose the war a million times over.
I like messing with phone scammers and telemarketers. I always try new scenarios. Once I answered and shouted on the phone "Listen here, if I get only one more call from you, I will find you, I will kill you, I will behead you and I will shit in what's left of your throat, is that understood?". My wife was absolutely mortified and afraid that they'd call the cops on us (as if scammers would put themselves just for some empty threats). Unfortunately for me, or fortunately, the calls have drastically diminished in number since that one call...
What I want is a system that starts off very quiet to lure the perpetrators into upping their headset volume, then blasts discordant sine waves at maximum amplitude.
This is probably kind of antisocial and some might make the “they’re just following orders” argument, but I want consequences and a conditioned psychological response for those who call and especially those who defraud.
If I were on the jury for the civil case where you are accused of destroying several minimum wage call center employees' eardrums and hearing, I would vote guilty.
Ridiculous, it’s on the headset operators to keep the devices at safe levels. That’s like me sending you a fax and you suing me for a papercut you gave yourself with it.
I have no idea what lawyers would actually say but now I’m curious about making your fax machine print off Top Secret documents and illegal pornography.
When you don't want to talk to someone on the phone, you hang up. What was suggested here goes out of the way beyond hanging up to expressly cause annoyance or potential damage. It's not just speaking loudly into the phone, it is starting off quiet with the intent that the telemarketer turns up the volume on their device, and then screaming into the phone.
It's not even close to your suggestion. A papercut would be a potential injury in normal use of a fax machine, from wanted or unwanted faxes. That would be like someone hurting their wrist when holding the phone up to their head.
> Stella May Liebeck was born in Norwich, England, on December 14, 1912. She was 79 at the time of the burn incident. On February 27, 1992, Liebeck ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a McDonald's restaurant at 5001 Gibson Boulevard Southeast in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of a 1989 Ford Probe, which did not have cup holders. Her nephew parked so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it.[10] In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.[11] Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants, which absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks and groin.[12][13]
> Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17]
...
> The Liebeck case trial took place from August 8 to 17, 1994, before New Mexico District Court Judge Robert H. Scott.[20] During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20 °F (11 °C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.[12] Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns.[21]
Of course, why am I bothering? You apparently think that human beings are just objects to be fucked with for your own pleasure, and that telemarketers are akin to literal Nazis who were "just following orders" when committing genocide, thereby justifying any harm you would do to them.
Just like McDonald's lost because their coffee was unusually hot, parent would lose too because is answer was unusually loud on purpose and it's purpose was to hurt others.
The lawsuit and payout was nevertheless justified, because their coffee cup design was defective and because McDonalds were being assholes who refused reasonable requests to cover her medical expenses.
>McDonald's coffee was served at a temperature between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit. McDonald's had long known that this was 20 to 30 degrees hotter than the coffee served at most other restaurants; in fact, this temperature range was indicated in its operations manual
>During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee
> McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C)
> Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).
That 9 degree gap between McDonalds and Starbucks isn't very meaningful since both those lower bounds are more than hot enough to cause third degree burns. 155F coffee can cause third degree burns to children and the elderly within 1 second of contact: [PDF] https://www.regionalonehealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02...
Coffee burns work the same no matter the year. Get a big cup of black coffee today from Starbucks or virtually any other coffee shop and it will be hot enough to give you third degree burns in less than a second.
The hot coffee lawsuit is like if somebody bought a fancy chef knife and the blade fell out of the handle and stabbed them in the foot. Their lawyers then argue that the blade was far too sharp and also the handle was defective. They win the lawsuit because the handle was in fact defective. But now you have people on the internet saying that knife co made knives too sharp, when in reality any good knife will be sharp enough to stab your foot. The outcome of the lawsuit was correct but everybody took away the wrong lesson from it.
I don't think any phone or headset has enough power to actually destroy eardrums. They can be loud enough to cause pain and even hearing loss over long-term use, but not loud enough to actually blow out somebody's ear drums in one blast. Even shooting a gun without ear protection, which is much louder than any phone or headphone speaker, is very unlikely to ever rupture your ear drums outright (although some loss of hearing is certain.)
I don't think you could successfully sue somebody for "they played a loud sound that was painful but my ear drums are still intact."
Moreover, if you can come up with an attack that’s a workplace safety violation against the call center, they’ll have to come up with some kind of countermeasures to protect their workers’ ears if they don’t want to get sued and shut down. Do this enough times and the costs to them may exceed the benefits.
(Mind you, this only applies to call centers operated at the behest — employment or contractual — of companies that are headquartered in places that actually have workplace safety regulations. Won’t protect you from scammers operating out of developing nations. But it might cause a technological differentiation between scammer tech and other call-center tech; at which point it would become possible to detect scam calls just by the “sound” of them, and have middleboxes drop them.)
I always assume that failure to regulate something, when coming from an entity with essentially unlimited power such as a government, is simply done on purpose.
+1 for the irony, but I was meaning broadly. I'm on the other side of the planet, and still find astonishing how those things work in similar ways across the globe.
Most of these phone scammers are in India, so two observations: they don't care about local laws, and they're far more likely to speak English than French or German. It makes sense for them to target a very large population of wealthy English speakers, e.g. Americans.
Yeah, they could call a German and try to scam them in English, but that's probably less likely to work than scamming somebody in their native language.
No one would answer calls from an Indian phone number and it would be incredibly expensive. This is relevant because number spoofing is blocked by the telcos in the EU.
What's funny is that Americans can very quickly distinguish an Indian accent. So any time I answer the phone and hear an unexpected caller with an unknown voice and an Indian accent calling himself "Kevin" I know it's a scammer immediately and I hang up.
That's essentially the law in America too. For the last 20 years or so, we've had the "Do Not Call List" and if you add your number to it, you don't get these calls.
Unfortunately that law only works for land lines. Cell phone spam was virtually unknown 20 years ago because cellular minutes were not free, and anybody who wasted your time on a cell call could be sued for costing you money. Also back in those days there were no comprehensive databases mapping people to mobile numbers. Finally there didn't exist easy ways of spoofing your caller ID number so if you spammed someone you would likely be caught.
That's all different now, which is why the old law needs to be updated for mobile phones.
In Belgium, that's not the case for phone calls. You can't email or fax someone without their prior permission, but you can call them, as long as they're not on the do-not-call-list.
Of course, that list is dead in the water. It has to be _bought_ by companies trying to call people and no effort is being done to make the existence of the list known to the public.
"Surprisingly", the board of the non-profit managing the list consists of representatives from call-centers, marketing associations and telco's.
(I had a major run-in with them once, because their previous website allowed adding phone numbers to the do-not-call-list without verification. So I tried adding all of Belgium's phone numbers with a script).
When I lived in Australia these were quite a nuisance. Companies would sell your data as there was basically no real data protection. I don't know if it had changed since.
The calls would typically come in waves. I would deal with it by letting the callers know how I felt about them and their job. Some would argue with me saying they bought my number fair and square.
Just as you, I live in Flanders. I get calls in English, French, even Spanish. Sometimes even in Dutch. In my experience, the English and Dutch speakers hate French, while the French and Spanish speakers hate Dutch. So you choose whatever they hate most and start asking about their favorite brand of toothpicks or whatever untill they fold. Double the fun when they find someone else speaking your language, at which point you switch to another language. Or go to pig latin.
Germany, so decently big market. For a short time (a few months after the FB leak which included my phone number), I’d get those robot (literally, old-school automated messages) scam calls from "Interpol" about needing my passport. That lasted for a few weeks, maybe 8 or so calls. No scam calls before that, none since. The number has been the same since about 2002 when I got my first phone.
Anything you can do to waste the time and annoy telemarketers the better. Even if it's just letting it ring instead of sending the unwanted call to voicemail, those seconds of letting it ring are seconds not being spent to scam someone else.
Telemarketers and spam are a problem with an easy solution, but the money to the phone company and everyone in between apparently is just too good to give up.
> Even if it's just letting it ring instead of sending the unwanted call to voicemail
It doesn't work like that. They have let's say 10 operators and a dialer that calls say 25 numbers from a ring buffer of say 10000 numbers; the first 10 to answer within x rings are diverted to the available operators, and remaining numbers are pushed back on the list tail, then when operators become available, other groups of numbers are called and diverted to them, and again those who don't answer are pushed back in the list. If you don't answer, they'll lose only a few seconds max. The best way to fight this crap is to have them actually waste their time, so that whoever is paying those operators will lose money and get nothing in return.
Of course, AI will render this completely useless since they won't have anymore real people to pay, however I would anyway keep wasting their time, if not because that would keep one of their exit phone lines busy, which means one less call to a potential victim.
The timings between the events (telemarketer calls, victim answer, telemarketer plays automated random greeting, victim replies, telemarketer transfers call to human operator, etc.) can be used for an effective blocking. Like a more advanced Lenny, play an audio captcha that an human call would hear but that will also get lost to a telemarketer and, when call arrives to their operator, the victim's system is already playing random funny stuff to burn up their time.
Better to just screen the call, if they think your number is a lead they will not only repeatedly call but they'll probably also sell your number to others so they also repeatedly call. The phone system is effectively broken, if you're not in my contacts you are getting screened.
I think that's a better strategy in theory, but in practice it doesn't really make a big difference. I mute all calls that don't come from my contact list, and I go back and block the caller afterwards. I still get telemarketing calls almost every day. For years and years I've been doing this. I don't think their systems are smart enough to know that I'm never going to talk to them and it's a waste of their time.
This is just another Robokiller, what we need a virtual answering assistant using 11 Labs with voice to text to determine if it’s a human and then transfers the call to me. Someone please build this.
My Pixel phone lets me direct calls to a call screener (https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en), which screens them and shows me a live transcript while letting me give instructions, hang up, or pick up at any time.
I love this call screener; it's great when I'm not expecting a call and I'm unsure whether it's an important one. Anyone who isn't legit will just disconnect rather than playing along.
You don't need AI for that! "Lenny" is years old and wastes telemarketers time with only about 15? pre-recorded prompts played at random. Excellent results at https://www.lennytroll.com/
Huh - last I looked (10 years ago) it was an asterisk script and a few wav files. It looks like lots of people have copied them for different setups, so I guess that domain isn't by the original authors. But just find the recordings on youtube, the voice performance is just perfect.
I felt a little bad for the telemarketer at times as she was so patient with him, but I literally LOLed when the ducks started quacking toward the end :-D
I am getting a lot of calls from a Mr. Likely. His first name is Scam. I don't know a Scam Likely, why does he keep calling me?!
Seriously though, my spam to legitimate phone call ratio is about 10 to 1 (10 calls spam/telemarketing for each call I actually want).
My phone does a good job identifying scam, and if not I simply ignore any call from a number I do not know. If it is important they'll leave a number!
The part that I do not understand is how it is possible to call 1000's of numbers for free. Just do not allow any flat plans with free calls anywhere; charge a few cents per call and lower the flat fee.
Normal folks will save money, and scammer will need to pay.
Technology makes it easy to abuse resources which were previously freely available.
Telemarketing calls abuse our attention. Well then one of possible solutions is to charge money for stealing or attention. We should be allowed to set price per minute to call us via phone.
So what else are people going to do with ChatGPT automation to annoy and waste peoples time? This particular application seems like a just cause, but this exact hack can be used in bad ways also.
I listened to the whole sample video. At the end, the (Indian sounding) telemarketer (assuming it’s real) calmly says “I’m here to fuck your daughter. I’m here to fuck your wife and daughter” before hanging up.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadhttps://jollyrogertelephone.com/
i nuked a scam caller once with a killer deez nutz joke. the guy went bonkers when he realized. i think it was ligma or bofa or something. that day i won a battle.
since then i receive 25+ calls a day. i had to enable call blocking from unknown numbers. unfortunately i sometimes have to disable this feature when expecting calls.
you may win a battle and walk away with a cool war story but you will lose the war a million times over.
Can’t say I’ve observed any difference in inbound frequency.
If we could just advise everyone to mess with them and waste their time, the problem would go away.
(Which is the opposite of local advice by “law enforcement” to just hang up, which just speeds up the scammer’s process to find an actual victim)
This is probably kind of antisocial and some might make the “they’re just following orders” argument, but I want consequences and a conditioned psychological response for those who call and especially those who defraud.
The major difference is whether it was done with malicious intent, which is a factor in legal culpability.
It's not even close to your suggestion. A papercut would be a potential injury in normal use of a fax machine, from wanted or unwanted faxes. That would be like someone hurting their wrist when holding the phone up to their head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
> Stella May Liebeck was born in Norwich, England, on December 14, 1912. She was 79 at the time of the burn incident. On February 27, 1992, Liebeck ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a McDonald's restaurant at 5001 Gibson Boulevard Southeast in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of a 1989 Ford Probe, which did not have cup holders. Her nephew parked so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it.[10] In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.[11] Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants, which absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks and groin.[12][13]
> Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17]
...
> The Liebeck case trial took place from August 8 to 17, 1994, before New Mexico District Court Judge Robert H. Scott.[20] During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20 °F (11 °C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.[12] Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns.[21]
Of course, why am I bothering? You apparently think that human beings are just objects to be fucked with for your own pleasure, and that telemarketers are akin to literal Nazis who were "just following orders" when committing genocide, thereby justifying any harm you would do to them.
https://www.citizen.org/article/legal-myths-the-mcdonalds-ho...
The plaintiffs claimed so, but this wasn't actually the case. The coffee was so hot that it caused truly disturbing third degree burns, but that's completely normal for coffee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
The lawsuit and payout was nevertheless justified, because their coffee cup design was defective and because McDonalds were being assholes who refused reasonable requests to cover her medical expenses.
https://www.findlaw.com/injury/product-liability/the-mcdonal...
>McDonald's coffee was served at a temperature between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit. McDonald's had long known that this was 20 to 30 degrees hotter than the coffee served at most other restaurants; in fact, this temperature range was indicated in its operations manual
https://www.poolelg.com/blog/the-truth-behind-the-mcdonald-s...
>During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee
> McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C)
> Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).
That 9 degree gap between McDonalds and Starbucks isn't very meaningful since both those lower bounds are more than hot enough to cause third degree burns. 155F coffee can cause third degree burns to children and the elderly within 1 second of contact: [PDF] https://www.regionalonehealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02...
What's the point in mentioning Starbucks coffee temperature in 2004?
It's about franchises like McDonald's in 1994
The hot coffee lawsuit is like if somebody bought a fancy chef knife and the blade fell out of the handle and stabbed them in the foot. Their lawyers then argue that the blade was far too sharp and also the handle was defective. They win the lawsuit because the handle was in fact defective. But now you have people on the internet saying that knife co made knives too sharp, when in reality any good knife will be sharp enough to stab your foot. The outcome of the lawsuit was correct but everybody took away the wrong lesson from it.
I don't think you could successfully sue somebody for "they played a loud sound that was painful but my ear drums are still intact."
Among my favorite moments from that show, haha
https://youtu.be/43-7fGKKg2s
(Mind you, this only applies to call centers operated at the behest — employment or contractual — of companies that are headquartered in places that actually have workplace safety regulations. Won’t protect you from scammers operating out of developing nations. But it might cause a technological differentiation between scammer tech and other call-center tech; at which point it would become possible to detect scam calls just by the “sound” of them, and have middleboxes drop them.)
Failure to rate limit outbound calls is a choice. Failure to auto block bad participants at the network level is a choice.
They are paid to choose otherwise.
Yeah, they could call a German and try to scam them in English, but that's probably less likely to work than scamming somebody in their native language.
I think it’s much more common in English speaking countries because collectively they’re the most attractive target with 450m+ wealthy consumers.
Unfortunately that law only works for land lines. Cell phone spam was virtually unknown 20 years ago because cellular minutes were not free, and anybody who wasted your time on a cell call could be sued for costing you money. Also back in those days there were no comprehensive databases mapping people to mobile numbers. Finally there didn't exist easy ways of spoofing your caller ID number so if you spammed someone you would likely be caught.
That's all different now, which is why the old law needs to be updated for mobile phones.
Of course, that list is dead in the water. It has to be _bought_ by companies trying to call people and no effort is being done to make the existence of the list known to the public.
"Surprisingly", the board of the non-profit managing the list consists of representatives from call-centers, marketing associations and telco's.
(I had a major run-in with them once, because their previous website allowed adding phone numbers to the do-not-call-list without verification. So I tried adding all of Belgium's phone numbers with a script).
But my friend living in the South of Belgium, who spoke French, got plenty more.
If a scammer employs Flemish / Dutch speaking people they'll have a small target audience.
For Dutch you're looking at 25 million potential L1 targets [1].
However do that for French and all of the sudden you have about 80 million L1 potential targets [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
Telemarketers and spam are a problem with an easy solution, but the money to the phone company and everyone in between apparently is just too good to give up.
(leaves phone off the hook)
It doesn't work like that. They have let's say 10 operators and a dialer that calls say 25 numbers from a ring buffer of say 10000 numbers; the first 10 to answer within x rings are diverted to the available operators, and remaining numbers are pushed back on the list tail, then when operators become available, other groups of numbers are called and diverted to them, and again those who don't answer are pushed back in the list. If you don't answer, they'll lose only a few seconds max. The best way to fight this crap is to have them actually waste their time, so that whoever is paying those operators will lose money and get nothing in return.
Of course, AI will render this completely useless since they won't have anymore real people to pay, however I would anyway keep wasting their time, if not because that would keep one of their exit phone lines busy, which means one less call to a potential victim.
I’m moving to hello… (go mute)
I felt a little bad for the telemarketer at times as she was so patient with him, but I literally LOLed when the ducks started quacking toward the end :-D
Seriously though, my spam to legitimate phone call ratio is about 10 to 1 (10 calls spam/telemarketing for each call I actually want).
My phone does a good job identifying scam, and if not I simply ignore any call from a number I do not know. If it is important they'll leave a number!
The part that I do not understand is how it is possible to call 1000's of numbers for free. Just do not allow any flat plans with free calls anywhere; charge a few cents per call and lower the flat fee. Normal folks will save money, and scammer will need to pay.
Edit: Spelling
Telemarketing calls abuse our attention. Well then one of possible solutions is to charge money for stealing or attention. We should be allowed to set price per minute to call us via phone.
I had thought of this approach, but really what I'd like is for my provider to allow me to block calls by caller ID, not just by the number...