What happens when I text a autodialer while rejecting a call?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > What happens when I text a autodialer while rejecting a call?

erosion: Dec 21, 2002; It's true and I'm tired of pretending it isn't

I don't like unknown numbers calling my phone. My new way of dealing with unknown numbers is to reject the call with one of the canned responses built into my phone. But I don't know enough about how autodialers work to figure out what this does in their system. My hope is a text to their landline fucks with their system enough they'll stop calling my number.

The only problem with this approach I can think of is it proves that I am a real human responding to the call, instead of going to voicemail which is more ambiguous. In any case, I can't find anything on Google and hope somebody will know how this goes down. Thanks!

# ? Feb 21, 2016 19:22

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 30, 2024 20:57

OpusD: Sep 7, 2003; I weep for the motherland.

Back in the elder days I would get "junk mail" faxes at work. It was a waste of our fax printer ink. So once I faxed them back 10 copies of a solid black piece of construction paper. They stopped faxing us.

So I guess the moral of the story is to create your own autodialer to call them once every 5 minutes.

OpusD fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Feb 22, 2016

# ? Feb 22, 2016 00:56

erosion: Dec 21, 2002; It's true and I'm tired of pretending it isn't

Oh my God, it's even better than I thought.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/text-to-landline-faqs

quote:

5. How does Text to Landline work?

When you send a message to a landline, the recipient's address is first checked to make sure it's eligible for the Text to Landline service. Then your text message is recorded in a female voice, and the service calls the recipient's phone.
If the phone is answered, a recorded message will ask whether the listener wishes to accept a message that's been sent from a wireless subscriber [sender's phone number] at no charge. If the listener accepts, the recording of your text message will be played. If the call is received by an answering machine or voice mail, the recording will be delivered to the device or service as a voice mail.

Note: Common abbreviations are recorded as full words. Unintelligible abbreviations or words are spoken as is or are read letter by letter.

quote:

22. Can I use acronyms and emoticons in Text to Landline messages?

Yes, Text to Landline will translate many acronyms and standard emoticons into words, so the recipient can understand them.

For example:
LOL will be read as "laughing out loud"
:-) will be read as "happy"

This is an untapped gold mine, ladies and gentlemen.

# ? Feb 22, 2016 09:42

SLOSifl: Aug 10, 2002

There's no way any text message you send gets through their PBX system or "fucks them up" at all.

# ? Feb 22, 2016 16:24

Farmer Crack-Ass: Jan 2, 2001; this is me posting irl

There's a really good chance they're using a bogus phone number as their caller ID. Even if it isn't, it probably just goes to an automated menu that isn't going to give a poo poo about a phone call that spits machine-generated voice data at them and then hangs up.

Voicemail actually isn't that ambiguous. If an autodialer hits a voicemail, it's going to be recognized and recorded as such, and they're very likely going to try the number again at some point.

When you get a telemarketing call, if there's a weird delay between saying "hello? ...hello?" and a person responding, that's because a computer on the other end is trying to decide whether or not you're a real person in order to either just hang up or to connect you to one of their agents (or they dialed too aggressively and it's waiting for an agent to be freed up to connect to you).

Your best bet at automatically wasting telemarketers' time would be to try and craft a voicemail greeting that sounds like you've just answered the phone, and even then it's only going to be on the order of a few seconds.

# ? Feb 22, 2016 17:02

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 30, 2024 20:57

Shadowhand00: Jan 23, 2006; Golden Bear is ever watching; day by day he prowls, and when he hears the tread of lowly Stanfurd red,from his Lair he fiercely growls.; Toilet Rascal

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

There's a really good chance they're using a bogus phone number as their caller ID. Even if it isn't, it probably just goes to an automated menu that isn't going to give a poo poo about a phone call that spits machine-generated voice data at them and then hangs up.

Voicemail actually isn't that ambiguous. If an autodialer hits a voicemail, it's going to be recognized and recorded as such, and they're very likely going to try the number again at some point.

When you get a telemarketing call, if there's a weird delay between saying "hello? ...hello?" and a person responding, that's because a computer on the other end is trying to decide whether or not you're a real person in order to either just hang up or to connect you to one of their agents (or they dialed too aggressively and it's waiting for an agent to be freed up to connect to you).

Your best bet at automatically wasting telemarketers' time would be to try and craft a voicemail greeting that sounds like you've just answered the phone, and even then it's only going to be on the order of a few seconds.

Farmer Crack-rear end is exactly right. Generally, autodialers are required to be able to detect voicemails and either leave a vm or hang up, depending on the marketing/debt collection being done.

I used to work at a cloud-based dialer company. If anything, it would do nothing at all to their system since most agents don't have voicemail and any direct calls to an agent's number would just fall into the auto attendant set up.

# ? Feb 22, 2016 18:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > What happens when I text a autodialer while rejecting a call?