Rise of the (scamming?) machines!

[Aeson]

OK, necroed thread. Duh!

It's the pungent smell of zombie threads that attract all the weirdos.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

When I answer the phone and there's silence for 4-5 seconds, sometimes I say, "This is the part where you hit 'play' to start your pre-recorded message spiel." And sometimes I let them start their spiel and then talk over them, saying, "I'm going to start talking now while you're still talking, and the fact that you haven't stopped talking tells me I'm dealing with a pre-recorded message, and I don't listen to pre-recorded messages" before hanging up.

Johnathan

Ditto!

 

[Ryujin]

When I answer the phone and there's silence for 4-5 seconds, sometimes I say, "This is the part where you hit 'play' to start your pre-recorded message spiel." And sometimes I let them start their spiel and then talk over them, saying, "I'm going to start talking now while you're still talking, and the fact that you haven't stopped talking tells me I'm dealing with a pre-recorded message, and I don't listen to pre-recorded messages" before hanging up.

Johnathan

It should be noted that robocall systems, that are manned by call centres, also can have a delay of a few seconds while the autodial computer assigned the call to a "representative." They will generally be set to recognize a voice response and then either pass the call on if the person called responds, or hang up after a predetermined period if there is no response.

 

[Thierry-Advent]

Never had a video AI robot call on my iPhone. If the land line rings it's 98% sure that it's scammers. Everyone else call our cellphones. We only have it because of the house alarm and our internet provider.

 

[TheHand]

There was a scam call practice from a few years back (before AI got as good as it is now) where the callers could only respond with preprogrammed sound boards. This was done so any foreign sounding accents wouldn’t give them away. So while the sound boards were human operated they were limited to just the canned responses on the machine.

I’m not sure if the practice is still being done, but that description of non-sequitur answers to things like “space hippos” reminded me of it.

 

[Koloth]

It should be noted that robocall systems, that are manned by call centres, also can have a delay of a few seconds while the autodial computer assigned the call to a "representative." They will generally be set to recognize a voice response and then either pass the call on if the person called responds, or hang up after a predetermined period if there is no response.

That may explain why most robocalls are confused by my old style answering machine on the landline. After it says "Please leave a message after the beep." most robocall gizmo fail to continue the call. Not complaining. Have the landline as cell reception sucks where I live.