Anti-Telemarketing Bot Strikes Back at Phone Scammers

Telemarketing scams such as the fake IRS phone scam and fake Windows Tech Support phone scam cost Americans hundreds of millions of dollars last year and it often targets vulnerable citizens such as the elderly and new immigrants. There are several examples on YouTube of those trying to fight back and trying to pester the phone scammers themselves by trolling them but this does not quite feel as satisfying, especially to the elderly who lost a chunk their life savings to these criminals. These inbound call centers are usually based out of India but mask their numbers to appear as if they are using a local area code to the region they are scamming. While many phone companies offer a do-not-call registry, this does not seem to help at all to curb the problem and with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, these inbound call scammers are just becoming more brazen in their attempts. There author of The Jolly Roger Telephone Co. has a better way to hit back against these inbound telemarketing scammers through a custom bot that wastes these telemarketer’s time instead automatically.

The author of the bot explains that telemarketers have predictive dialers which attempt several times and only connects to the actual scammer on the other line if it has found a real person responding. The author has created a fairly sophisticated algorithm that simulates the handshake so that the call is always transferred to the scammer and they do not detect that it is in fact a bot on the other line. These pre-recorded bot responses keep the scammer on the line and use up their time, after a long time of silence the handshake initiates again so it can keep going. Even better news is that the author of the bot is implementing a “broadside” attack soon which will allow him to send thousands of calls simultaneously and keep all the telemarketer’s lines busy with the bots so they won’t be able to reach an actual user on the other line. Of course, this is not as fun as a “manually” trolling these phone scammers but once many of these bot systems are deployed, then more time will be wasted by these scammers and it will be less economically feasible for them to do the scam in the first place.