Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire:
The man who developed a bot that frustrates and annoys robocallers is planning to take on the infamous Windows support scam callers head-on. Roger Anderson last year debuted his Jolly Roger bot, a system that intercepts robocalls and puts the caller into a never-ending loop of pre-recorded phrases designed to waste their time. Anderson built the system as a way to protect his own landlines from annoying telemarketers and it worked so well that he later expanded it into a service for both consumers and businesses. Users can send telemarketing calls to the Jolly Roger bot and listen in while it chats inanely with the caller. Now, Anderson is targeting the huge business that is the Windows fake support scam. This one takes a variety of forms, often with a pre-recorded message informing the victim that technicians have detected that his computer has a virus and that he will be connected to a Windows support specialist to help fix it. The callers have no affiliation with Microsoft and no way of detecting any malware on a target's machine. It's just a scare tactic to intimidate victims into paying a fee to remove the nonexistent malware, and sometimes the scammers get victims to install other unwanted apps on their PCs, as well. Anderson plans to turn the tables on these scammers and unleash his bots on their call centers. "I'm getting ready for a major initiative to shut down Windows Support. It's like wack-a-mole, but I'm getting close to going nuclear on them. As fast as you can report fake 'you have a virus call this number now' messages to me, I will be able to hit them with thousands of calls from bots," Andrew
said in a post Tuesday.
Re:Scammers don't use real numbers
By Revek
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2017-Feb-8 17:30
• Score: 5, Informative
• Thread
Go read how it works. You transfer crap calls to one of the robots and it talks to them for you. It now works with sip, so I added an extension on my pbx to transfer it to them. It emails you the recording but I also record it on my pbx.
This Man is a Goddamned Superhero!
By RumGunner
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2017-Feb-8 17:31
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
Vigilante justice has never been funnier.
Scam
By Archangel Michael
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2017-Feb-8 17:35
• Score: 3
• Thread
When your scam relies upon a script, it is easy to script a response that falls within the norms of what you're expecting out of your victims.
Queue the robot that checks the "I am not a robot" check box ... because it can.
Re:Legality
By number6x
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2017-Feb-8 18:10
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
How is this even legal? It is a crime to waste the money of corporations.
What planet do you live on? It cannot be planet Earth!
In no way, shape, or form is it a crime to waste the money of a corporation. Besides, they are free to hang up at any time and to stop wasting their own time.
This is a completely ridiculous thought. Almost as laughable as when people write things like "Corporate officers are obligated by law to make a profit." This is a completely false statement.
Companies are under no obligation to profit. They are completely free to fail and go bankrupt. They would like to profit and not fail, but they are under no legal obligation to do so. Stockholders or owners would like a company to be profitable and to make them money. They may choose new corporate leadership if a company is doing poorly, but they seem to be just as likely to hire a Carly Fiorina and run the company into the ground, while patting each other on the back for their great ability to pick such a great leader!
Corporate officers are required by law to follow legal accounting practices, and to follow the law when reporting their accounting to government agencies for things like paying taxes, or complying with insurance reserve laws, or payroll employment insurance obligations. This is just the same as an individual filing their taxes must be honest. They would be subject to fines if they don't follow these tax and accounting laws. Jail may be possible if criminal intent or negligence could be proven. However, they can be losing money, wasting money and frittering it away and still be completely in compliance with the law.
If it were truly a crime to waste the money of a corporation, pretty much all corporate managers and officers would be criminals.
nothing new
By Lumpy
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2017-Feb-8 18:29
• Score: 5, Interesting
• Thread
I was doing this 10 years ago with Asterisk phone server. get a phone call at the house, press *1 and it transfers them to telemarketer hell where it plays random human responses that are a lot better than his as I was looking for pauses in audio to respond, his is just random audio that is not responding to the audio coming in.
There was a asterisk guru that published all the goodies on how to do this over a decade ago and I used his code and modified it a bit. worked great and the longest I tired up a telemarketer was 2 hours.
about 4 years ago someone had a better one called "this is lenny" that emulated an old senile man and was recording the calls for everyones entertainment.