Topic: Get Rid of Telemarketers

[W1RC]

Just about everybody I know HATES telemarketers who bother and annoy us with their endless scamming phone calls.   How do we get rid of them?  There are a couple of ways to do this.......

1.  Call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222.

It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time.  It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

It takes about 20 seconds, but you must call from the number you want blocked or you can register online at:

www.donotcall.gov

Of course since most of these scumbags don?t obey the law harsher and more covert methods are required.

2.  You can implement TELCO technology to banish them by using a series of Special Information Tones (SIT) to fake out their predictive dialing equipment. 

Background:  Telemarketing companies typically use predictive dialers to place many calls simultaneously often using telephone numbers in a database. When the equipment detects that someone has answered one of the many calls it has made, it quickly transfers that call to an available agent. Unanswered calls, or numbers that are disconnected, are not transferred to agents and the call is terminated automatically.

In this way, the agent is spared the time of dialing a call and waiting for an answer, and can simply speak to waiting calls that have been already set up. Additionally, if a number is determined to be disconnected, the equipment will usually mark that number as such and will not dial it again or as often.

A predictive dialer merely checks for three conditions:

A SIT signal, as described above.

When there is a short response, like "hello", the system connects the called person through to a salesperson. 

A long response, such as an answering machine message, in which case it hangs up and re-queues the number to call back later or leaves a sales message.

When this tone signal is played on the line, a predictive dialer calling this number would detect it and assume the tones are generated by the phone company indicating that this number has been disconnected and is no longer in service.   The system would immediately terminate the call and likely mark the number as "disconnected" in its database.  The predictive calling equipment computer would then move this number to a special NIS numbers database for call back to try again sometimes in the future, usually six month later.

However, some telemarketing firms have turned off the SIT tone detector altogether in response to the this trick, rendering it wholly ineffective.

Another limitation is that the device does not work well with voice mail systems. This is because voice mail reroutes the call from a physical line to the voice mail service without the phone ever picking up. 

However, notwithstanding the above it does work and gets rid of most of them..........at least for a while.

There is a device, the Telezapper, on the market that does exactly this.  It is available for around $40.  However you need?t spend the money because there are two files attached to this post that you can download and put on your answering machine that can be played over your line when a call is received to het rid of most of them.

Here are some more detailed resources:
https://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/recordedannouncements.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_information_tone

Best regards,

MisterMike