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Welcome to the ecosystem of lead-generation, and the specialized marketing campaigns which drive business sales. One of my earliest technical jobs was writing

Welcome to the ecosystem of lead-generation, and the specialized marketing campaigns which drive business sales. One of my earliest technical jobs was writing the middle-ware systems that handled lead data, and tracked the sales conversion rates of the companies we served. As an aside, it is the worst job I ever had in any of my careers… In general, you are never dealing with a single company: 1. An advertiser operating on Radio/TV/Web/Email to drive specific consumers to a company sales lead funnel 2. A marketer running a consumer data collection form (Web/1-800-Call-center/SMS/IVR) to sort which campaign is best suited for the potential consumers 3. A marketing data-broker cross-referencing and scrubbing user data to filter bogus/old/duplicate customer leads, and ascertain the time critical nature of which campaigns to deploy new leads into 4. A company sales campaign manager monitoring lead conversion rates between the data-broker and the company sales platform (often another web-form/call-center/IVR/spammer/SMS). In general, most professional firms will drop campaigns under a 17% success rate, but spammers are happy even under 0.056% terrible rates (where old lead data goes after everyone else gave it a hard pass). 5. A sales conversion success rate lead price adjustment by push back from the company campaign to the data-broker (higher % sales per lead pool mean higher prices). The data-broker also cross checks the conversion rate for a given lead pool, and will adjust the quality/price per lead by comparing many company campaigns to keep everyone honest. While many firms will honor a Do Not Call record flag by law, once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world. It was also common for call-centers to leech call lists to resell to other data brokers, which would predictably have terrible conversion rates equivalent to spam email. I should probably mention the data-broker was also a social networking site owner, and this was the primary fiscal motivation behind running the platform. ;-)

lelanthran 4y ago
I do the same thing with every cold-call power-sales phone call I get. I try to keep them on the line as long as possible, while paying as little attention as possible. Put the phone on speaker, turn down the volume a little, and carry on working on my computer. I feel that the only way to end spam (email and phone), is to take up as much time of the spammer as possible. If all 25m recipients of an email scam replied with the intention to drag it out as long as possible, the scammer will never identify those who actually fell for it. If all 25m recipients of a phishing email responded with poisoned data, the target bank would quickly realise what was happening. If everyone who ever receives a spam phone call kept the person on for 30m instead of dismissing the call in 5s, it would be unprofitable to make these calls. In general, dropping the ROI on these techniques to negative would stop them.
- derivagral 4y ago
  There's an old project that does exactly that! Lenny has some long vids up on youtube. I suppose the next step is using some of the newer AI stuff to improve the interaction... https://lennytroll.com/ https://lennytroll.com/
  - ccozan 4y ago
    GPT Lenny? Automatically transcript and feed, then TTS. Maybe someone takes on this.
- Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Unfortunately, automated IVR systems have become difficult to quickly spot thanks to Google Machine Learning based NLP, and your telecom company still pays the robocall campaign even if you never answer due to how the legacy phone systems were designed. Additionally, while the VoIP based phone centers boxes allowed inexpensive/free long distance, they also provided the unscrupulous unlimited outbound traffic to cold-call users. Even if your telecom only pays fractions of a penny to receive the call, a third-world teenagers computer time is likely worth far less than you'd guess. ;-) While the number-filters on modern smart-phones are fairly good (origin spoofing is illegal), these devices still suffer from other problems like app lamer-ware stripping contact lists (is your "cloud backup" on by default?).
jacquesm 4y ago
> once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world Hence the GDPR's 'legal basis for processing' requirement. If you did not obtain consent for that specific use then you don't have a legal basis for processing.
- Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Relevant if and only if all entities involved fall within a given legal jurisdiction, and many dubious firms "partners" do not for this very reason. One often can't completely solve a fiscally driven technical problem with legislation. Accordingly, what percentage of people actually read those 5 page end-user-agreements before enabling cloud backup on their phone (about 1/3000 on average). ;-)
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > Relevant if and only if all entities involved fall within a given legal jurisdiction This is not correct. For instance: https://blog.netwrix.com/2020/03/27/gdpr-in-the-us/ https://blog.netwrix.com/2020/03/27/gdpr-in-the-us/
    - Joel_Mckay 4y ago
      I am quite sure it is not valid in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Brazil, China and Russia? Again, one is incorrectly assuming scammers care about your local laws in the first place, and present informal fallacy as an argument with little contextual relevance. Given our uniquely crafted developer contact data was often injected into the data sets as a logic test, it was common practice to climb back up the delivery pipeline to identify the cheats and cons. ;-)
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Yes, the number of Pakistanian, Indian, Nigerian and so on websites EU people visit is off the scale. Oh, wait, it isn't. And even then: technically they do fall under the GDPR.

lelanthran 4y ago

I do the same thing with every cold-call power-sales phone call I get. I try to keep them on the line as long as possible, while paying as little attention as possible. Put the phone on speaker, turn down the volume a little, and carry on working on my computer. I feel that the only way to end spam (email and phone), is to take up as much time of the spammer as possible. If all 25m recipients of an email scam replied with the intention to drag it out as long as possible, the scammer will never identify those who actually fell for it. If all 25m recipients of a phishing email responded with poisoned data, the target bank would quickly realise what was happening. If everyone who ever receives a spam phone call kept the person on for 30m instead of dismissing the call in 5s, it would be unprofitable to make these calls. In general, dropping the ROI on these techniques to negative would stop them.

derivagral 4y ago
There's an old project that does exactly that! Lenny has some long vids up on youtube. I suppose the next step is using some of the newer AI stuff to improve the interaction... https://lennytroll.com/ https://lennytroll.com/
- ccozan 4y ago
  GPT Lenny? Automatically transcript and feed, then TTS. Maybe someone takes on this.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Unfortunately, automated IVR systems have become difficult to quickly spot thanks to Google Machine Learning based NLP, and your telecom company still pays the robocall campaign even if you never answer due to how the legacy phone systems were designed. Additionally, while the VoIP based phone centers boxes allowed inexpensive/free long distance, they also provided the unscrupulous unlimited outbound traffic to cold-call users. Even if your telecom only pays fractions of a penny to receive the call, a third-world teenagers computer time is likely worth far less than you'd guess. ;-) While the number-filters on modern smart-phones are fairly good (origin spoofing is illegal), these devices still suffer from other problems like app lamer-ware stripping contact lists (is your "cloud backup" on by default?).

jacquesm 4y ago

> once a lead is in the ecosystem it can be resold to dozens of firms all over the world Hence the GDPR's 'legal basis for processing' requirement. If you did not obtain consent for that specific use then you don't have a legal basis for processing.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Relevant if and only if all entities involved fall within a given legal jurisdiction, and many dubious firms "partners" do not for this very reason. One often can't completely solve a fiscally driven technical problem with legislation. Accordingly, what percentage of people actually read those 5 page end-user-agreements before enabling cloud backup on their phone (about 1/3000 on average). ;-)
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > Relevant if and only if all entities involved fall within a given legal jurisdiction This is not correct. For instance: https://blog.netwrix.com/2020/03/27/gdpr-in-the-us/ https://blog.netwrix.com/2020/03/27/gdpr-in-the-us/
  - Joel_Mckay 4y ago
    I am quite sure it is not valid in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Brazil, China and Russia? Again, one is incorrectly assuming scammers care about your local laws in the first place, and present informal fallacy as an argument with little contextual relevance. Given our uniquely crafted developer contact data was often injected into the data sets as a logic test, it was common practice to climb back up the delivery pipeline to identify the cheats and cons. ;-)
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Yes, the number of Pakistanian, Indian, Nigerian and so on websites EU people visit is off the scale. Oh, wait, it isn't. And even then: technically they do fall under the GDPR.