said by mazilo:said by JoeSchmoe007:The problem with your situation is that if you just ask to press a key the people will do just that, including those you don't want to talk to.
Exactly. If you read my
post and follow up the discussion, you will notice the scheme I proposed requires the caller to know what number s/he has dialed. When you receive a call from a telemarketer, s/he doesn't necessarily know your numbers because s/he didn't dial your numbers. For that, s/he won't be able to fulfill the requirement to proceed to the next stage to ring your phone. You can implement such a scheme with as little as a single digit and/or as many digits as you wish. A single digit gives a probability of 10. As such, if you implement a two digits scheme, the probability is 20 and that is good enough to deter most telemarketers.
You sound as if you may be serious. I was pretty sure you were being satirical. Seriously, I have implemented the single digit JoeSchmoe007 method »
[Anveo] 'CONTACT CHECK' + 'PRESS KEY' = PERFECT SPAM TRAP , and it is very effective. I know it sounds as if defeating it would be trivial, and I have not gone through a political season with it in use, and maybe I am not on the list of hot prospects and only warrant robocalls, but it has been wonderful. I check the calls received history, and then I look up the number in 800notes etc. Usually the numbers are listed. Now I get an average of one per day deflected.
I wonder if most telemarketers even have touchtone pads to navigate phone trees. Even if they do, they might have figured out that those numbers that have even a minimal Turing test are not going to be receptive to their spiel. I have never bought or donated money from a cold incoming telemarketer. I have donated goods from charity pickups, but I have decided to not support that anymore; there are drop-off places that did not call me. I have not answered telephone "survey" questions for many years.
I have tried messing with the callers... particularly the ones that try to imply they are soliciting for the local police. I miss that a bit.