Are any of you starting to get AI robocalls?

Tue Apr 3 22:48:30 UTC 2018

Just throw a dial tree plan in front of getting ahold of you. "Press 1 to
speak to a human." this foils most dialers which wait for a human to answer
before they throw anyone (anything?) on the line. They may also have the AI 
get through the unpleasantries before they stick a human on it.

Many voip providers offer a dial tree. I have a provider with a snazzy web drag n
drop tree construction system, so you dont need to learn m4/asterisk/linenoise
and even directs SMS's to email for me. I've set it up for my wife and myself
(hit 1 for me, 2 for her) and I use it on all my online ordering stuff because
I know they'll be hacked sooner or later and my info leaked into the wild for
abuse.

I dont know how cell companies expect to be able to continue to offer any
voice services with the lack of enforcement against robodialing - I get calls in
the middle of the night (and have to leave my phone on for on-call from random
customers I dont know the ph# for). Even though I give my direct cel # out to
almost no one, I get 3-5 random calls a week. (I dont doubt that phone hacks are
uploading people's contact lists to the cloud for further infection/robodials,
as well as plain war-dial trawls).

I have a spam contact with > 150 ph#s in it. (I need an app to share these and
subscribe to autoblock but havent gotten a round tuit it yet.) Worse, they're
spoofing real ph#s - I call back calls I didnt answer and they all claim they
didnt call me - because a robodialer spoofed a legit ph# to avoid mass filter
lists. (Beware ph#s that use your NXX - human gut reaction is to answer ph#s
that look like your own supposedly, but its likely a robodial).

All this boils my blood. I am not sure why/how spoofing ph#s is legal. I get
sms mass spam too.

Too much control is left in the sending side, need way better filtering tools
on the receiver. Soon enough however I hope to just be able to dispense with
voice communication and point customers at something else (even SMS would be
better). Im not sure we're at the point you can enforce that without pissing
off customers but we're close.

(I dont support capital punishment for much, but this might be one thing... :)

/kc

On Tue, Apr 03, 2018 at 06:32:19PM -0400, William Herrin said:
  >Howdy.
  >
  >Have any of you started to get AI robocalls? I've had a couple of
  >calls recently where I get the connect silence of a predictive dialer
  >followed by a woman speaking with call center background noise. She
  >gives her name and asks how I'm doing. The first time it happened it
  >seemed off for reasons I can't quite articulate, so I asked: "Are you
  >a robot or a person?" She responded "yes" and then launched in to a
  >sales pitch. The next time I asked, "where can I direct your call?"
  >She responded "that's good" and launched in to her pitch.
  >
  >Regards,
  >Bill Herrin
  >
  >
  >-- 
  >William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
  >Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>

--
Ken Chase - math at sizone.org Guelph Canada