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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

I answer the phone every time a scammer calls and put the phone back in my pocket without hanging up. Yes this might increase how many calls I get, but that's ok.

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Is there an endlessh for spam calls? Let an ai just sit there and drive them slowly insane so they have less time to defraud other people?

What I actually started doing is setting my voicemail greeting to a fax machine tone. In Google voice you can also put spammers into a penalty box, so only they get the fax machine. This stopped a lot of my spam calls.

I used to have my answering machine start with a "1" dial tone, which made all the bots connect real people to talk to my regular greeting, and real callers weren't too bothered by it. Nowadays it's harder to use something that doesn't also trick real callers.

There is overlap between the smartest robocall software and dumbest humans. To be charitable people are not expecting an instruction of "We are screening incoming calls. To ring through press 1." and often react by hanging up thinking they dialed the wrong number. And calling again.

Yeah, even something that doesn't trick the real callers will at least be annoying. Some things just say "call again to be connected," but robo-callers seem to have caught on.

There's a very simple version of this where a recording of a confused but very polite and cooperative elderly man answers the phone and speaks when the other person pauses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)

https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Some of the recordings are pretty fun. Some scammers stay on the phone with him for almost an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM

I found a recording of Lenny at work, this is absolutely brilliant. No ai, just responds in a loop and is extremely well engineered to infuriate the scammers.

Yes but the hard part is knowing who to send to it. Currently, services for this use a honeypot to gather spammers' numbers; not sure how that works given that they spoof it anyway.

Also any off-phone service relies on setting up forwarding from some voip number, which is never quite the same as a real one.

I used to intentionally answer robocalls, press 1, and try to transfer then to Lenny. A lot of spam center callers would hang up as soon as I said I was transferring them. One of the spammers I managed to connect to Lenny asked their coworker what was going on and the coworker recognized the Lenny script. I roped in another spammer for several minutes while they tried to sell to Lemmy.

You should avoid answering spam calls if it can be helped. If you don't pick up, your number will be marked as inactive in your system and they won't bother to call you in the future

It costs them nothing to try, as often a human is not involved in the initial call, only being looped in if the call is answered.

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