Comment by lizardking
1 year ago
While not exactly the same, I once got a call from a number I didn't recognize, and when I answered the phone it was a recording of my wife saying "Hello?". I no longer answer phone calls by saying "Hello", unless I know the caller.
I have a system that takes it one step further and both reduces the awkwardness and false-positive rate at the same time: I add the people that I know to the contacts on my phone. When a call comes in as a number instead of a name, I simply decline to pick it up. If it's not a spam call, they will either leave a voice message or send a text. If they do neither, then either it was a spam/scam call, or whatever they had to say probably wasn't that important in the first place. Win/win.
I've been doing this for a little over a decade and it hasn't let me down yet.
> and it hasn't let me down yet.
It's let me down a ton. Deliveries, contractors, maintenance people, doctor's offices with a last minute appointment available, and so forth. Fortunately never for a true emergency, but that's also something to keep in mind as well.
There are lots of things that people simply don't leave a voice mail or text because if they can't contact you immediately, there's no point. Or if the contractor can't get you on the phone, they'll just move onto the next home and skip work on yours that day or that whole week.
So it's not win/win. It's very much win/lose.
my strategy is to live in a different place than my area code and only pick up from number that do not share my area code. This is pretty clise to working but I did almost miss an instacart delivery because they happened to be from my home town.
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A good tactic I use is as stated + if you see a number you don't recognize is to answer and then put yourself on mute and wait. Typically robocalls just hang up after a few seconds of silence.
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I leave a simple voicemail message: please send me a text.
People that listen to that will... send a text.
It is sad that virtually every form of communication: snail mail, phone, email is overridden with spam and fraud, and the "FCC" does jack about it except a CYA "hey we said it was wrong".
The FCC has been so thoroughly lost to regulatory capture and licentious industry - lobbying - official revolving door that it possibly the least effective federal regulatory agency, and that is saying something
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Those sound like cases where you would have heightened expectation of an important anonymous call. If that's not the case, and you must always maintain a high expectation of an important anonymous call, then I don't know what you can do. I guess that's how the telephone was, say, 70 years ago.
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For deliveries, if they have tracking (which most of them has) I'm expecting an unknown number, so when I pick up 99% of the time it's the delivery person.
For the rest, unless its an appointment that requires me picking up the phone ASAP (which is maybe once or twice a year for me), they leave a message and I just call back.
In France, we have a gouv service to block non-solicited phone commercial calls. It works pretty well. Combined with the default google spam blocker, most of the phone calls I receive are phone calls I want.
You’re correct. One suggestion is explicitly request email or text instead of calling. (Or WhatsApp in many countries.) Since some people are hearing-impaired, it’s not even an unusual request even before this spam program arose.
It won’t always work, e.g. the request won’t reach the delivery driver who’s a contractor of the subcontractor of the logistics company you mention this to. However, I’ve found it works with businesses that are small enough to care about customer satisfaction.
Add the contractor to your contacts.
This is a specific example of what should be a much more general practice: having separate protocols for establishing an initial contact and establishing a communications session with an already existing contact. My email spam filter is based on this. It does a first-stage separation between email from people I've corresponded with in the past and everything else. That simple heuristic is enough to achieve >99% accuracy all by itself.
Stepping back a bit, I find it kind of strange that knowledge of a 7-digit number is all that's required for anyone in the world to (by default) immediately interrupt someone.
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I navel-gaze that if we redesigned communications from the ground up we could handle this better. When you greet someone physically you can add each other as known trusted contacts immediately. And when you sign up to some service online and have to put in your contact info, which likewise prompts you to add them as contact. And you can't share along a contact you know to someone else without that contact ID uniquely identifying you.
That way, everyone who should contact you can do so and if someone else gets their hand on your contact info you can figure out who leaked it.
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I've though a little bit about what a good successor to email would look like, and in addition to things like native support for encryption and authentication, one of the big features I wanted was to put not allow sending a message unless the recipient had added you to their list of contacts. And maybe have a way to to send a request that someone add you to their contacts, that would be processed differently than a normal message.
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That's my approach as well, but I had the same number calling me for 3 weeks and I finally answered. It was my electric company, something had gone wrong with a payment.
They have my email address, they send me txts all the time, but apparently collections is still making phone calls. Had to be the dumbest thing I'd seen. Once I answered and found out the issue, I paid the bill properly, but I wonder how far it would have gone before they cut off my power, while they kept sending me emails and txts about things that have nothing to do with my bill.
For some places their internal processes require positive contact with the account holder, in other words they can't trust that an email or text will be read (or read by the account holder). They definitely should've tried at least once though, especially if you opted for that as your primary communication method.
That seems strange to me.
I mean: I think it is perfectly OK to have a policy that requires real people to make real phone calls for some things -- especially things that might not fit into automated systems.
But I think it's very bizarre that these real people would not also leave a voicemail message stating the purpose of the call.
(There's tons of reasons for people to not answer the phone that extend beyond screening unknown numbers.
Like: I might be happy to answer the phone for a strange number but I'm crawling around under my car and my hands are covered in greasy road funk. Or I'm with a client. Or I'm at work and my boss is an overbearing prick. Or...)
I've had a disturbingly large number of repeat calls from people who absolutely refuse to leave a message. And it's always some recruiter who saw an opening on indeed or somewhere and thinks the resume I updated 5 years ago is a good match.
The problem is that if I'm getting repeated calls from an unrecognized number, I'm assuming my wife, my kids, or my parents are in an ambulance, so I have to drop everything and answer.
As a rule of thumb, if I get a one-off call that doesn't leave a message, I'll search my email inbox for that number, as they've probably contacted me separately. However, one time, I got called 5 times in 90 minutes, with the only message being 23 seconds of silence, and an email I hadn't even read yet (searching the number brought up the email). I sent an angry email that amounted to "you have told me how you AND YOUR CLIENTS treat prospective employees' time. I will never apply to any job you suggest, even independently of you. Stop calling"
Many of us are in situations where we get calls from various people we haven't had contact before (nurse at the child's school, parent's doctor, there's a lot of them) that should be answered immediately; waiting until later to listen to the message could have significant impacts. Some of the calls (injured child) could require immediate contact and, if not answered, could result in other issues.
My area code doesn't match my area, and most e.g. recruiters are calling from other area codes as well, so I can be reasonably confident that a local-area-code call is legitimate, but man is it frustrating to brace myself for "$child/$spouse/$etc is on their way to $hospital..." and instead I get "I was very impressed by your skills I got from $someJobBoardIHaven'tUsedInYears, are you free to talk about a $industryOrCareerFieldIDon'tWorkIn position located in $areaIHaven'tLivedInInYears?"* Especially if they've called repeatedly in a short amount of time without leaving a message.
*bonus if they're speaking heavily accented english and miss important connecting words, suggesting they don't even really understand the script they're reading from, much less the job description they just pulled off of Indeed or wherever.
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Yeah, when you have small children, your obligation to pick up the phone when they aren't with you is increased. I also find that whenever you're shopping for big-ticket items that involve salespeople and soliciting multiple bids, you have to forego your "don't pick up the phone for unknown numbers" policy.
I now just pick up and say "hello?" and count off two seconds. If I don't hear a response within that time I hang up. I've had a couple false positives, but they generally just assume there was a dropped call and try again.
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Newer versions of Android and iOS allow you to immediately send a call to voicemail and then watch the live transcription
If it’s important, the caller will generally start leaving a message, and you can pick up right there
One way might be to list a number that you monitor as their "emergency contact" but list a virtual or other no-pick-up-policy number for all other forms.
The only issue is that a friend once listed me as their emergency contact for a gym membership, but then the gym made telemarketing calls to me with it. There should be federal law protecting emergency contact numbers from being shared or used for any reason except an emergency.
Alternative method might be to set up a Twilio workflow that says "Press 1 to reach me" and only forward to your actual phone after that. That will probably eliminate all the robocallers but not the human telemarketers
I have children. And I didn't say I wait until later to listen to the message.
I can't think of any non-action-movie scenarios where me picking up the phone within a specific 120 second window would be a life-or-death situation. If there are any, they are so unlikely that they are not even remotely worth being annoyed by multiple scam calls a day.
This 100%. iPhones have a feature to do this automatically. It doesn’t even ring, and goes straight to voicemail if they’re not in your contacts. It’s so freeing!
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111106
How do you deal with deliveries from DHL and similar?
Everytime I buy something from an eshop I have to start taking calls around the delivery date.
Also it would be a bit annoying (and risky!) to have to remember to turn it on and off again any time I order food.
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Then I get complaints from doctors that they are being shoved directly to voice mail, because they somehow have 8 different numbers to log.
Thank you for mentioning this. It was news to me
One major flaw in this, at least for me: Dr's offices. They love to dial from a gazillion random numbers, and for privacy reasons they often leave no message or a very vague and concerning "Call us when you get this" sort of thing.
Ugh, and then you call the number and it takes you to an IVR menu where the only options are “billing” and “surgery” or other some such. I’ve had doctors call me with results and the only way I could get ahold of them was to call, pretend I had a billing issue to get to some human, then try to convince them to connect me to the person who just called me not 5 minutes ago.
Yes. The office that I am with just leaves a message saying to call them back. I am always happy to.
I have a different system. I pick up the phone, listen to them for a bit, tell them "please wait while I get my credit card number", and then I just walk away with the connection still open.
It's great when it works, but when my mom was in the hospital and they needed to reach me, I got burned by this big time and don't do it anymore. It's too easy to miss a call that could literally be life and death (my mom is better now).
This is an example of the Trust On First Use policy, like when you SSH to a machine whose cert you don't have and you are invited to trust it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use
And the entire "Hang up, look up, call back" is just a trapdoor firewall. From a 10,000-foot perspective, humans and computers are the same, they're just nodes that communicate information.
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I do exactly this but take it even one step further. My actual (primary) phone number is only ever given out to humans. I have a second Google Voice phone number that I give out to machines (e.g. online shopping that "requires" a phone number that will eventually be leaked).
What happens when one of the people to whom you gave your number shares their contacts with some app?
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I have a child, he has a phone but his battery might go empty, or the phone is lost or broken, he has my number written down and I instruct him to call me from a colleague or a stranger. Maybe my case is special since my son has some health issues so I really want to know immediately if something happened.
This kind of problem needs to be solved at the root cause, say if the phone companies could be made to pay a bit when you get spammed and forced to recover their costs from the spammers the issue would be solved, now if they profit the issue will get larger and alrger.
For this type of case it would be ideal if you could give him a passcode.
Couldn't be too difficult to set up a "unknown number" redirect that prompts for a pin, then forwards to a live line if correct.
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This method unfortunately falls apart if you get a phone call from a hospital. They'll leave you a voice message, but when you call the same number back you'll get the front desk instead of the doctor who left you the message. They'll patch you through to the ward your Dad's in, but they won't be able to give out any information over the phone, so you'll need to wait for the doctor to call you back. They're out doing their rounds at the moment, but they'll get back to you as soon as they can.
I do the same, but even the legitimate callers never seem to leave a voicemail or send a text message.
I have missed deliveries or other important things due to my policy.
Yup, same. I'll make an exception if I'm expecting an important call but aren't sure of what number it's going to come from. This is rare enough that it doesn't bother me much. And now that some calls are SHAKEN/STIR-verified, with a caller ID, I can often have good confidence before I pick up that it's actually the call I'm waiting for.
Imagine all of the unnecessary insurance and “Google tech support” you’re missing out on purchasing.
I do this too, but I also remember that I'm doing this from a situation of privilege, where I mostly don't have to wait for calls that could be life changing (ex: old-school HR calling back for a new job).
On Pixel phones (or was it Google Fi? can't remember), this is automatic. If it's not someone in my contact list already, known spam gets auto blocked and everyone else gets redirects to the voice assistant that takes a message and transcribes it. Cuts down on spam like 99% for me.
I had an iPhone for a few months and the spam was so bad, even with the third party spam blockers. I switched back to Android shortly after.
100%
If the number isn’t in my contacts, it goes to voicemail.
I used to answer calls from local numbers, but I’ve started getting spam calls with my local area code now.
I do the same thing usually. If I do pick up an unknown number because I am expecting something, I usually press speaker and mute and just wait. If it's a person, I'll get an awkward Hello? And if it's an auto dialer usually I get nothing or the waterdrop beep and drop either way.
I do a thing where I answer and just dont say anything (ensuring my enviornment is silent) for like 20+ seconds.... they hang up and I block number. (The bot thinks its a dead num and I dont get calls again.
Spammers will spoof local numbers. I had my pharmacy call me only to find out it was a scam call that used spoofing.
This is also why you always call anyone you don’t know back on a listed number like the switchboard of the company they claim to be from if you think you need to engage with them
I've a somewhat uncommon area code (less than a million 307 numbers), so any time I get a call from a 307 number, I'm reasonably confident that its either a wrong number, or a spoofed number. In either case, I don't answer. Its quite a system.
I try to live this way, but people have become increasingly bad at actually leaving voicemails.
I wonder if this could be setup as a rule to go directly to voice mail if not in contacts.
Yes, this is available in iOS settings.
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iPhones has a setting for this
If your car gets stolen, and the police find it, they will call you from a phone number that's not in your contacts. If you don't pick up, you won't realize that your stolen car has been recovered a couple miles from your house, and if you show up there in 30 minutes you can drive it back home, but if you don't, the police will send it to a towing yard, which will require you to go through 24 hours of paperwork with the police to obtain a release and then pay the towing yard $1,000+ to tow and store your car.
If you live in an area of low crime, though, maybe it'll be fine not to answer phone calls from numbers that aren't in your phone.
Man, that is the most edge case reason I've ever heard for answering anonymous calls.
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How long does it take to listen to a voicemail and call them back? A one or two minute delay is almost never going to cause an issue.
Even in the highest crime areas the ratio of spam calls to legit and urgent calls is going to be thousands to one. You can cumulatively save a lot of time and annoyance by not answering all of those spam calls. I'm actually surprised to see this debated, I also stopped answering unknown numbers years ago and thought that was standard at this point.
I do not pick up the phone unless the caller is in my contact list. No exception (my phone does not even ring).
All other calls are routed to voice-mail and near-instantly transcribed. The message then shows up on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I can read it and respond to it as necessary.
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If my car got stolen the last thing in the world I would do it take it back immediately.
Who knows what damage has been done to the clutch, or the engine internals while it was bouncing off the rev limiter for minutes at a time. Also I'll bet there is a lot less rubber on the tires than before, and probably all kinds of nasty stuff on the inside.
Heck no I'm not taking it back. That's insurance all day long.
I have different rules that take effect when I'm expecting an incoming call. Such as, I take my phone out of airplane mode.
In my experience, police officers leave voice messages.
I would expect them to leave a voicemail in this situation.
Okay, so maybe answer your phone when you're expecting an important call. But otherwise, probably safe to wait for a text or voicemail.
I'm still using "Ahoy-hoy" as Bell intended.
Try out “Pronto?” like the Italians for extra flavour
Try “Moshi-moshi?” for a Japanese flavor.
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I answer in Russian, angrily.
"What's up, suka blyat!"
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Precisely, I give zero information. If I do pick up once in a blue moon, I pause for 3-5 seconds to give a chance for the human to start (if it isn't a bot).
I have a Pixel phone and a Google bot can answer the phone for me. It transcribes the conversations on my phone in real-time, and I can push a few buttons to tell to bot what to say--things like "tell me more", or "please tell me why you're calling".
If the entity calling gives an explanation I care about, then I can press a button and the bot says "thanks, connecting you now" and then I can say "hello" with my own voice and have a normal conversation. I think most people think it's just a fancy answering machine, they don't realize I'm controlling it.
Voice calls are on the decline anyway, but I think it's becoming possible to have a very sophisticated AI secretary answer calls for you, even beyond what I've explained Google is doing. Imagine being able to give your LLM phone secretary a prompt and it would answer calls for you. You could tell it something like "the snowblower I listed in the classifieds is already sold" and maybe it could automatically resolve some calls or text messages for you.
I have the same phone and feature. My experience is that everyone always hangs up immediately after facing the screener. I'd love to actually use this feature, I mean hell, I can fucking text responses to them and read what they say through it! But I never can in a realistic setting because people hear robot and hang up. I've been eagerly waiting Apple's release so that the feature becomes more well known. Google really dropped the ball on advertising and honestly I think should have just pushed it to all Android phones because you need to change how people interact. I've worried it would go away because Google deems it "useless" despite its uselessness being that the feature is just not known. There's just too few Pixel phones so people aren't experiencing the screener and so act like a normal human being and go "robot? Ugh, fuck that" and associate this with calling a 1 800 number.
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> I think most people think it's just a fancy answering machine, they don't realize I'm controlling it.
FWIW, I'm betting it is just a fancy answering machine for most people. I use this feature (couldn't live without it), but I've never once been in-the-loop. My phone acts autonomously! I checked the logs for a few months, but I don't even bother anymore. It's never had a false positive.
Ditto, it really should be the standard. Well, as well as the government actually enforcing these laws strictly. I am pretty sure they could compel companies to maintain and filter out spam/robo calls. Especially if it costs them $$$$$
The phone system has gotten so bad these days that a lot of the time the pausing for 3-5 seconds isn’t voluntary - it just doesn’t connect the call properly. The most basic hundred year old regular phone call is too much to handle for modern systems I suppose
same, but now a lot of callers whom i would like to speak with -- e.g. my insurance company -- just hang up before greeting me (because they think my phone's broken?). but then if i screen everyone via voicemail instead, a different (but overlapping) portion of callers refuse to leave messages. it's like everyone's given up on using the POTS outside of their immediate social circle, and the few people/businesses who still do are either malicious, or are just going through the motions.
thanks spammers. and thanks FCC for sitting idly over the decades and letting the spammers ruin it. weird time to finally put your foot down, but sure, okay.
I just answer every phone call by saying, "My voice is my password, verify me."
Exactly what I do. And I don't pick up unless I recognize the number or I'm expecting a call for a specific reason.
I've been getting these calls where nobody says anything for like 3 minutes then someone says Hello. My paranoid mind thinks they are trying to record my voice to use AI to impersonate me.
Same. Probably from playing too much Uplink, where calling the sysadmin was the easy way to circumvent the voiceprint authentication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplink_(video_game)
"I am the systems administrator. My voice is my passport. Verify me."
(Which is itself a callback to the 1992 movie Sneakers.)
That game was so, so good. Do you know any others that feel the same way? (doesn't have to be about hacking)
> My paranoid mind thinks they are trying to record my voice to use AI to impersonate me.
You're not paranoid, banks, the Minnesota Attorney General and the FCC have been warning about scammers recording even as simple as a "yes" to use in their scams [1][2][3], although actual evidence has been scarce to say the least [4].
[1] https://www.membersalliance.org/_/kcms-doc/816/34363/Can-You...
[2] https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/Publications/CanYouHearM...
[3] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-warns-can-you-hear-me-phone...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Hear_Me%3F_(telephone_...
I've got this call regarding energy prices in Poland (worth mention, it happen AFTER maximum prices threshold was frozen by govt). A pre-recorded "lady" persistently tries to force me to say "yes" going with "something interrupted us, can you hear me?" over seven times.
Search results point for this number as being related to PV panels scam.
My thought has been that they're listening for background sounds to try to beef up the advertising profile they have on me. Maybe there is some super sketchy ad-tech company putting beacons that emit a QR-like UUID audio signature in the frequencies near the top and bottom of the range that gets transmitted by cell phones, and ringing you up from a robo-dialer and listening for the beacons tells them where you are.
As far fetched as it sounds, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
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The pause used to be while they routed the auto dialed call to an available agent (can’t have them waiting for the rings… efficiency!).
In this case you may be right.
FWIW, I get these, too. All unknown numbers go straight to voicemail, which auto-transcribes, so I just see "Hello... hello..." in the transcription and hit delete. No idea what it's about.
I got a call sort of like that, it was bizarre. A person claiming to be a Comcast rep called, introduced themselves, asked if I was me, and then immediately hung up as soon as I made a noise.
It is possible they just hung up because I was already a little skeptical and feeling cagey, so didn’t give an enthusiastic “yeah that’s me.”
Anyway, I’ve never been called for something that benefits me. So, hopefully every company that depends on cold-calling will go out of business soon as everyone younger than, like, halfway through gen X doesn’t pick up their phone anymore.
Should we start randomly picking the helo message from other countries? I'd go with mushi-mushi. A number of my friends would understand that.
They wouldn't if you said it like that https://jisho.org/word/%E3%82%82%E3%81%97%E3%82%82%E3%81%97
i've had the same thoughts since the mass amount of robo called happened for the last 8 years
its definitely whats happening, you're not crazy
Sorry for the breach of phone etiquette but I am on the same page here - the caller needs to speak first so I can tell whether they're a real person or not. If it's an automated system I'm happy to remain silent in the hope that they don't realize my phone number isn't another automated system.
I guess you'll end up confusing a lot of people since it's exactly backwards from the normal handshake.
Although you're not alone, most of the time when I call customer support and it's an overseas call center, I have to say Hello 2-3 times before the person on the other end acknowledges my existence. I guess they don't realize that I can hear all of their background noise before they talk.
Maybe robocalls will get so annoying that rule will change.
And don't normal people end up saying something like "hello?? Anyone there?" in that case anyway?
If they end up hanging up and texting me out of confusion then that's the best outcome I could've asked for... otherwise the call is either from a receptionist (who generally speak first anyways) or a relative that has learned of my vocal recalcitrance.
I think the convention is that the person whose job it is to be on the phone is responsible for speaking first.
In the very rare event that somebody calls somebody else for leisure (who doesn’t text yet? Really.) I guess the caller should initiate.
Yep, wait and if a human is like "hello?", then say "Can you hear me now?"
You guys are answering the phone?
Maybe if I just placed a delivery order I will answer for an unknown local number. Beyond that, leave a message at the beep and maybe I'll check it in a few days.
When you’re dealing with contractors and whatever for house stuff, yeah you kinda need to answer the phone for long stretches of time. Same if you have kids (I don’t), you need to be receptive. Yes yes I am incredibly aware that people can leave voicemails and send text messages, but many out there won’t do it, from real experience, especially those outside of the tech bubble.
I have a friend who would always answer the phone with a robotic monotone "READY" like a C64 BASIC prompt. It made people think he was a robot, and confused the real robots.
at 56 i hate to admit it, but i think i just lol-ed.
My employees get calls from "Hey, this is Mike at Goldman Sachs. Matt asked me to give you a call about the customer volumes."
I have gotten into the habit of answering the phone in the Graham-Bell/Mr. Burns way by answering "Ahoy Hoy" whenever I get a number that I don't recognize. I figure that that's not going to be as useful for any training purposes, and is also pretty inoffensive, so even if I don't get a robot then it won't offend anyone.
> I figure that that's not going to be as useful for any training purposes
Um what? Why? It's just as much a sample of your voice, and if it's what you usually say on the phone then a recording of it will... sound like it's you on the phone.
This is going to highlight my ignorance of AI, so bear with me, but my rationale (which is probably wrong) was that they are training their model on my voice specifically for the word "hello". If I provide "Ahoy Hoy!" to them instead, and their system thinks that that is "hello", it might mess up their model a bit.
As I said, I don't really know what I'm talking about, that was just my rationale.
I just don't care. It's not like they can train a bot to convincingly speak like me from just one word. And if they can, the game is already over and we've all lost.
That said, I don't answer suspicious numbers and I won't move past "hello" until the caller identifies themselves.
That's going to be a major and widespread issue very soon.
Unfortunately, rulings such as this FCC's are ineffective to prevent it. If someone is already committing fraud, they obviously won't care if it's illegal to use an AI-generated voice.
If I immediately hear sound from the caller it's usually a valid call. If I wait several seconds and it's just quiet, it's an automatic dialer waiting for a voice response. I found it highly effective at weeding out spam calls.
Wonder how many secs of voice you need to replicate one. You can call a number programmatically, ask something silly. record the response and then recreate the voice. I can imagine one can do much harm. Like calling the voice's boss and tell him you fell in love with his wife and now resign.
This is why I love Google's new AI phone call screening feature. Some people get spooked by it and hang up, and sometimes spam calls get through via exploits like calling twice within a short time or somehow bypassing with a weird spoofed number (only happened 1-2 times so far)
I only answer the phone with "Who's calling?". If I don't want to talk to them, they get "this is his assistant, he's not available". If it sounds even slightly like a canned voice it gets hung up on.
I was once told that some automated dialing systems will listen for, and hang up/flag the number as another automated system, if you wait four seconds, say hello very clearly, and then say nothing else.
It… seems to work?
If I don't know the number, I answer with "Hola. Buenos días."
Nowadays I just grunt, I don't think they can voice print a grunt
eh you’d be surprised
you definitely can
When an unknown call happens, I pick up and wait 3 seconds before saying "Hello". Most of the time, the robot detects no voice and hangs up.
I answer the phone and don't say anything.
Humans will typically ask if anyone is there, robots will either start their pre-recorded bullshit or hang up.
What are they actually trying to achieve by doing this? To get you to speak so they can record more voice samples?
There are a series of gates. At the end is the scam. Each gate is designed to filter out those who will reach the end and not fall for the scam. Or in other words, by the time you are making the scam pitch, the scam is already done, because you know by then it will work.
The calls are just one of the early gates, as someone screening your call is likely not to fall for the eventual scam.
The gates don’t have to be clever for this to work. There merely has to be enough people that you are going to find that 0.1% who will fall for it.
This is what always gets me. I want to finally speak to the scammer and have him listen to me play guitar, but alas! I fail the tests...
I think it's about proof that the number puts them in touch with a real person. I suspect if the robocall gets enough engagement they'll even put an actual scammer on their end.
My other guess is that it's one of those things where it only connects to actual person if you say something. I could try actually talking to see what happens but now that I read on this thread that they record you for replay maybe not.
Absolutely this, I am confident that there are people out there who verify phone numbers from data leaks, selling off known “good” numbers to other nefarious people. They probably record it all now too and sell that.
You just gave me chills. The future is going to be very creepy and unnerving I think.
The creepy, unnerving future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Yep, I don’t say hello anymore either, if I don’t recognize the number. Makes things awkward sometimes, but this is the dogshit awful world we live in.
Receiving a call like that would terrify me. I'd become super paranoid.
I've been screening all my calls with the pixel call screener feature. Worth it.