Telemarketing. Fake technical support calls. Unsolicited surveys. These are just three things that make us think about giving up our landlines... and then setting the phone on fire. Unless local authorities implement some protection mechanism, there isn't much a person can do, unless... they have an army of bots as allies. Tired of telemarketers and scams, Roger Anderson created The Jolly Roger Telephone Company, whose goal is to eradicate phone scammers.
A couple of weeks ago I received a (recorded) call from a mayor (read: intendant). A mayor of a municipality in which I do not live, and which is several kilometers away. Any political idea or vision this mayor might have automatically falls on deaf ears for a simple geographical reason, but the big question is: How did my phone number get into his database? Maybe he doesn't even have the number, and the work was done by a predictive dialer. That technique is also used by telemarketing, which bombards millions of people day after day to convince them to buy something that in 99 percent of cases they don't need, and that will likely give them a headache in the future. As if that weren't enough, today we must add phone scams in the form of fake technical support. A pop-up appears on the computer saying it's infected, and we must call the number on screen to speak with "specialized personnel". These scams are very common worldwide, but across the pond they're having a pretty bad time.
The Jolly Roger Telephone Company
Roger Anderson's story began when one of "operators" insulted his 14-year-old son, after he had wasted his time for a while. Unfortunately for the scammers, Anderson is a professional consultant focused on telephony... and he knows what he's doing. His response was The Jolly Roger Telephone Company, a firm under which he is developing an entire army of bots that answer these calls, trap the humans on the other side, and waste their time until they drive them crazy. The bots have small recordings, expressions like "hmm", "yes", "no", "uh-huh", and other strange phrases like talking about the weather, or "I have a bee on my arm". It's something subtle, diabolical, and beautiful at the same time, because with a bot on their side, the victim fights the scammer on the same level, destroys their patience, and later receives the recording by email, which is pure gold..
At first, Anderson was worried about the damage this army of bots could cause if it fell into the wrong hands, but last week he received a message on his PC talking about an infection... with a phone number. That number belonged to a "fraudulent nest" of technical support, and he decided to deploy the full power of his bots. He made 100 calls on 20 simultaneous channels. The scammers answered, talked to the bots, started putting them on hold, insulted them, started insulting each other (!), and asked what was going on. Then he repeated the process, this time with 500 simultaneous calls on 20 channels. By the time they reached call number 300, the scammers disconnected the number.
