Man designs ChatGPT bot subscription service to annoy, waste telemarketers' time
techspot.com
techspot.com
Failure to rate limit outbound calls is a choice. Failure to auto block bad participants at the network level is a choice.
They are paid to choose otherwise.
Yeah, they could call a German and try to scam them in English, but that's probably less likely to work than scamming somebody in their native language.
I think it’s much more common in English speaking countries because collectively they’re the most attractive target with 450m+ wealthy consumers.
Unfortunately that law only works for land lines. Cell phone spam was virtually unknown 20 years ago because cellular minutes were not free, and anybody who wasted your time on a cell call could be sued for costing you money. Also back in those days there were no comprehensive databases mapping people to mobile numbers. Finally there didn't exist easy ways of spoofing your caller ID number so if you spammed someone you would likely be caught.
That's all different now, which is why the old law needs to be updated for mobile phones.
Of course, that list is dead in the water. It has to be _bought_ by companies trying to call people and no effort is being done to make the existence of the list known to the public.
"Surprisingly", the board of the non-profit managing the list consists of representatives from call-centers, marketing associations and telco's.
(I had a major run-in with them once, because their previous website allowed adding phone numbers to the do-not-call-list without verification. So I tried adding all of Belgium's phone numbers with a script).
But my friend living in the South of Belgium, who spoke French, got plenty more.
If a scammer employs Flemish / Dutch speaking people they'll have a small target audience.
For Dutch you're looking at 25 million potential L1 targets [1].
However do that for French and all of the sudden you have about 80 million L1 potential targets [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
This is probably kind of antisocial and some might make the “they’re just following orders” argument, but I want consequences and a conditioned psychological response for those who call and especially those who defraud.
The major difference is whether it was done with malicious intent, which is a factor in legal culpability.
It's not even close to your suggestion. A papercut would be a potential injury in normal use of a fax machine, from wanted or unwanted faxes. That would be like someone hurting their wrist when holding the phone up to their head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
> Stella May Liebeck was born in Norwich, England, on December 14, 1912. She was 79 at the time of the burn incident. On February 27, 1992, Liebeck ordered a 49-cent cup of coffee from the drive-through window of a McDonald's restaurant at 5001 Gibson Boulevard Southeast in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of a 1989 Ford Probe, which did not have cup holders. Her nephew parked so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it.[10] In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.[11] Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants, which absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin, scalding her thighs, buttocks and groin.[12][13]
> Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17]
...
> The Liebeck case trial took place from August 8 to 17, 1994, before New Mexico District Court Judge Robert H. Scott.[20] During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20 °F (11 °C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.[12] Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns.[21]
Of course, why am I bothering? You apparently think that human beings are just objects to be fucked with for your own pleasure, and that telemarketers are akin to literal Nazis who were "just following orders" when committing genocide, thereby justifying any harm you would do to them.
https://www.citizen.org/article/legal-myths-the-mcdonalds-ho...
The plaintiffs claimed so, but this wasn't actually the case. The coffee was so hot that it caused truly disturbing third degree burns, but that's completely normal for coffee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
The lawsuit and payout was nevertheless justified, because their coffee cup design was defective and because McDonalds were being assholes who refused reasonable requests to cover her medical expenses.
https://www.findlaw.com/injury/product-liability/the-mcdonal...
>McDonald's coffee was served at a temperature between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit. McDonald's had long known that this was 20 to 30 degrees hotter than the coffee served at most other restaurants; in fact, this temperature range was indicated in its operations manual
https://www.poolelg.com/blog/the-truth-behind-the-mcdonald-s...
>During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee
> McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C)
> Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).
That 9 degree gap between McDonalds and Starbucks isn't very meaningful since both those lower bounds are more than hot enough to cause third degree burns. 155F coffee can cause third degree burns to children and the elderly within 1 second of contact: [PDF] https://www.regionalonehealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02...
What's the point in mentioning Starbucks coffee temperature in 2004?
It's about franchises like McDonald's in 1994
The hot coffee lawsuit is like if somebody bought a fancy chef knife and the blade fell out of the handle and stabbed them in the foot. Their lawyers then argue that the blade was far too sharp and also the handle was defective. They win the lawsuit because the handle was in fact defective. But now you have people on the internet saying that knife co made knives too sharp, when in reality any good knife will be sharp enough to stab your foot. The outcome of the lawsuit was correct but everybody took away the wrong lesson from it.
I don't think you could successfully sue somebody for "they played a loud sound that was painful but my ear drums are still intact."
Among my favorite moments from that show, haha
(Mind you, this only applies to call centers operated at the behest — employment or contractual — of companies that are headquartered in places that actually have workplace safety regulations. Won’t protect you from scammers operating out of developing nations. But it might cause a technological differentiation between scammer tech and other call-center tech; at which point it would become possible to detect scam calls just by the “sound” of them, and have middleboxes drop them.)
Seriously though, my spam to legitimate phone call ratio is about 10 to 1 (10 calls spam/telemarketing for each call I actually want).
My phone does a good job identifying scam, and if not I simply ignore any call from a number I do not know. If it is important they'll leave a number!
The part that I do not understand is how it is possible to call 1000's of numbers for free. Just do not allow any flat plans with free calls anywhere; charge a few cents per call and lower the flat fee. Normal folks will save money, and scammer will need to pay.
Edit: Spelling
I felt a little bad for the telemarketer at times as she was so patient with him, but I literally LOLed when the ducks started quacking toward the end :-D
i nuked a scam caller once with a killer deez nutz joke. the guy went bonkers when he realized. i think it was ligma or bofa or something. that day i won a battle.
since then i receive 25+ calls a day. i had to enable call blocking from unknown numbers. unfortunately i sometimes have to disable this feature when expecting calls.
you may win a battle and walk away with a cool war story but you will lose the war a million times over.
Can’t say I’ve observed any difference in inbound frequency.
If we could just advise everyone to mess with them and waste their time, the problem would go away.
(Which is the opposite of local advice by “law enforcement” to just hang up, which just speeds up the scammer’s process to find an actual victim)
Telemarketers and spam are a problem with an easy solution, but the money to the phone company and everyone in between apparently is just too good to give up.
(leaves phone off the hook)
It doesn't work like that. They have let's say 10 operators and a dialer that calls say 25 numbers from a ring buffer of say 10000 numbers; the first 10 to answer within x rings are diverted to the available operators, and remaining numbers are pushed back on the list tail, then when operators become available, other groups of numbers are called and diverted to them, and again those who don't answer are pushed back in the list. If you don't answer, they'll lose only a few seconds max. The best way to fight this crap is to have them actually waste their time, so that whoever is paying those operators will lose money and get nothing in return.
Of course, AI will render this completely useless since they won't have anymore real people to pay, however I would anyway keep wasting their time, if not because that would keep one of their exit phone lines busy, which means one less call to a potential victim.
I’m moving to hello… (go mute)
Telemarketing calls abuse our attention. Well then one of possible solutions is to charge money for stealing or attention. We should be allowed to set price per minute to call us via phone.
I had thought of this approach, but really what I'd like is for my provider to allow me to block calls by caller ID, not just by the number...