Lenny is a best-of-breed incoming telemarketer baiting system. It simulates a kindly but slightly addled old man--the perfect target for scammers--and through a

Lenny is a best-of-breed incoming telemarketer baiting system. It simulates a kindly but slightly addled old man--the perfect target for scammers--and through a simple Asterix system that waits for a pause, then plays a random response, can fool the telemarketer into repeating themselves over and over. It's remarkably effective at wasting telemarketers' time. I once received a tech support scam call and I managed to conference in Lenny right at the start. The call lasted 40 minutes; they kept shuffling Lenny around to different people so it took forever for them to realize it was looping. Now whenever I get a telemarketer call on my cell--illegal in the U.S., but no one seems able to do anything about VoIP calls from India--I rush to conference in Lenny and hope it "takes". Sometimes they stay on the phone but usually they disconnect. Lenny's starting to become famous! The next phase in this war is speech recognition. If the answer bot can pull out a key word like "Windows" or "virus" and repeat it back to the telemarketer ("Virus? I have a virus? Oh, what do I do?"), it is highly likely to pass the Turing test and waste an extra ten minutes of the poor scammer's time.