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My strategy is to answer every call but remain silent. 9/10 times they hang up after 2 seconds. The remainder are 50/50 real calls and manual spam calls. My a

My strategy is to answer every call but remain silent. 9/10 times they hang up after 2 seconds. The remainder are 50/50 real calls and manual spam calls. My assumption is that the robo dialers are recording the success or failure, and if you answer quickly but stay silent, that's some kind of failure. I've done this for a few years and I feel like I get less spam than I used to. Looking at my call log, it looks like I've had less than 5 spam calls in December.

kibwen 4y ago
More effective would be to have a button I can tap in the phone app labeled "waste this person's time", which would automatically attach the caller to an AI designed to maximize the amount of time the caller wastes on each call.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I once made a website where you could enter two phone numbers on. It would call A with B’s caller ID and B with A’s caller ID. After the call it would send an sms/call from the service explaining what happened and they could consent to release the recording for the pranker to listen to. It was funny to have Pizza Hutt and McDonald’s both think they’d called each other. Or two people standing right next to each other. I nearly got in quite a bit of trouble when someone pranked two high level people in the military, and they decided to have a conversation they probably shouldn’t have had on personal cell phones. It was fun while it lasted… but I wonder if something like this could work for spam calls. Basically instead of forwarding to voicemail, have it route to some pre recorded messages you make “yeah” “hello” “I didn’t hear that, can you say that again” and loud background noises playing. Then it can send you the recording as your “voicemail”. Could be fun.
- evan_ 4y ago
  You’ve described Lenny (well, without the AI) https://www.lennytroll.com/ https://www.lennytroll.com/ 1 (347) 514-7296
  - greggarious 4y ago
    [dead]

kibwen 4y ago

More effective would be to have a button I can tap in the phone app labeled "waste this person's time", which would automatically attach the caller to an AI designed to maximize the amount of time the caller wastes on each call.

withinboredom 4y ago
I once made a website where you could enter two phone numbers on. It would call A with B’s caller ID and B with A’s caller ID. After the call it would send an sms/call from the service explaining what happened and they could consent to release the recording for the pranker to listen to. It was funny to have Pizza Hutt and McDonald’s both think they’d called each other. Or two people standing right next to each other. I nearly got in quite a bit of trouble when someone pranked two high level people in the military, and they decided to have a conversation they probably shouldn’t have had on personal cell phones. It was fun while it lasted… but I wonder if something like this could work for spam calls. Basically instead of forwarding to voicemail, have it route to some pre recorded messages you make “yeah” “hello” “I didn’t hear that, can you say that again” and loud background noises playing. Then it can send you the recording as your “voicemail”. Could be fun.
evan_ 4y ago
You’ve described Lenny (well, without the AI) https://www.lennytroll.com/ https://www.lennytroll.com/ 1 (347) 514-7296
- greggarious 4y ago
  [dead]