Telemarketers, Ahoy

Then there’s Roger Anderson.

He’s harnessing technology to waste the time of telemarketers. Anderson’s vision is to build a world free of those annoying phone calls pitching solar paneling, debt relief, and timeshares.

The 48-year-old telephone-systems engineer acknowledges that eradication of the entire telemarketing industry is a lofty goal. But he figures that the more time telemarketers spend talking to one of the 10 computer programs he’s developed, the less time they will have to scam innocent people like you.

“If you want to pay it forward, you should waste as much time of that telemarketer as possible,” he says. “There’s a feeling of civic duty there to protect the next guy.”

Over the years, the federal government has tried mightily to protect consumers from unwanted telephone sales calls. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted rules limiting the hours that telemarketers can call. It has outlawed the recorded messages known as “robocalls” and cracked down on telemarketers whose caller IDs lie about their phone numbers—what is known as “spoofing.” The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) maintains a robust “Do Not Call” registry with 226 million numbers and regularly announces massive fines against companies that violate it. Yet none of these efforts has stemmed the flood of infuriating and often fraudulent calls.

“The technology has now developed to the point where it is quite easy and cost-effective to unleash massive numbers of robocalls on consumers,” says Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC. “There is no question that, unfortunately, the innovative spirit runs strong in these scammers.”

Pai says he receives between two and five robocalls a day on his government-issued cell phone, often from numbers that appear to come from the same area code and prefix as FCC headquarters. “If they are robocalling the FCC itself, there is something very wrong here,” he says. Pai has made cracking down on illegal robocalls the agency’s top consumer-protection priority.

Telemarketing is among the most despised of all professions. When Gallup asked about the public perception of telemarketers in December 2015, it found—unsurprisingly—that they were toward the very bottom of the list of professionals. A whopping 56 percent of those taking the survey said they considered telemarketers to have low or very low levels of honesty and ethical standards. The only groups that rated more loathsome were lobbyists (60 percent) and members of Congress (64 percent).

Telemarketing gathered steam in the late 1980s and early 1990s when advances in computing technology allowed businesses to inundate households with recorded messages. The disdain for the industry grew in parallel. In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry takes a call from a telemarketer asking him to switch telephone companies. He says he’s busy and asks for the man’s home phone number so he can call him back at a more convenient time, but the telemarketer says that’s not allowed. “Oh, I guess you don’t want people calling you at home? Well, now you know how I feel,” Jerry says as the studio audience bursts into sustained applause.

In 1991, Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which gave the FCC the power to crack down on autodialed calls. “The dinner hour in America is about to get quieter,” read the opening of a Washington Post story the day after Congress approved the bill. But it didn’t, and in 1994, Congress tried again with the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act, on which handed the FTC new powers to police unwanted telemarketing. The legislation led to the National Do Not Call Registry, on which consumers could place their phone numbers starting in 2003. It is illegal for a company to call one of these numbers unless it has a recent business relationship with the owner—or if one of a small number of other common-sense exceptions applies. (Numbers on the registry can still legally receive calls from political campaigns, debt collectors, charities, and polling companies.)

Nevertheless, the unwanted calls persist. Part of the blame falls on the telecommunications revolution, which has made long-distance and even international calls cheap. At the same time, the routing of calls is tougher to trace, especially if a telemarketing company has a complex legal structure, takes steps to mask its identity, or operates overseas. Placing robocalls may be illegal, but it’s easy to do and challenging for authorities to track.

In testimony before a Senate committee in October, an FTC official explained the economics: “Law-breaking telemarketers can place robocalls for a fraction of one cent per minute. . . . Because of the dramatic decrease in upfront capital investment and marginal cost, robocallers, like email spammers, can make a profit even if their contact rate is very low.”

Telemarketers have also become more sophisticated. They have better call lists and more information on potential customers than in the past. They use sophisticated software that figures out the best time to call so somebody picks up, dials numbers from lists automatically, and determines how many live employees need to be standing by.

The foes of telemarketing, though, are using some of the same technologies to fight telemarketers—or at least aggravate them.

THE JOLLY ROGER TELEPHONE CO.

Roger Anderson hit his breaking point a few years ago. The phone rang in his Southern California home, and it was a guy selling air-conditioning cleaning services. Annoyed, Anderson handed the phone to his 14-year-old son with instructions to waste the caller’s time. The telemarketer cursed at his son and hung up.

Springing into action, Anderson devised a home-brew answering system that required callers to press “1” on their phones for their calls to ring through to his landline. That halted all the telemarketing activity, but Anderson noticed that telemarketers continued to try his house thinking his system was just an answering machine. He wondered if there was more he could do to keep them from just moving on to the next victim.

“I stopped it at my house, but I realized I wasn’t inflicting any pain on the telemarketers,” he says. With calling technology so cheap, he figured that the live agents were the most expensive parts of the operation. If he could keep them on the line and waste their time, he thought, he could disrupt the economics of telemarketing: “If I can grind that machine to a halt, then their entire business plan collapses.”

He recorded snippets of himself talking and programmed a series of chatbots to talk to telemarketers using basic artificial intelligence. His robots sense pauses in conversation or a questioning inflection in a caller’s voice and offer a response. They cannot improvise dialogue but play recorded snippets, which often sound nonsensical in a conversation with a real human.

In a clip with a solar-panel salesman posted on his website, you can hear Anderson’s voice answering “mmm-hmm” and “yeah” to a series of the telemarketer’s questions, even to questions that seem to require more than “yes” or “no.” When the caller asks about the size of Anderson’s electric bill, the robot Anderson says: “Oh, gee. Hang on. There’s a bee on me. There’s a bee on my arm. You know what? You keep talking. Say that part again, and I’m just going to stay quiet because of this bee.” The telemarketer keeps talking and tries to engage in conversation but is peppered with updates about the bee (“It’s totally crawling up my arm! It’s freaking me out!”) and is asked to repeat himself at least a half-dozen times. Six minutes into the call, the telemarketer is clearly frustrated and says, “What the f— is going on?” and hangs up.

Anderson launched his service, the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, in 2016 and keeps adding more chatbots. For $6 a year, Jolly Roger will protect three of your phone numbers (landline or mobile).

His service screens out known telemarketers, connecting their calls to robots with names such as Crazy Mazy (“a nice old lady with a couple of screws loose”) and Whitey Whitebeard (“a senior citizen who likes to talk but gets a bit feisty if you waste his time”). After the call finishes, Jolly Roger emails you a digital-audio file of the conversation for your enjoyment. Anderson says Crazy Mazy holds the record; she once kept a cable salesman on the line for three-quarters of an hour. The company is growing and approaching 10,000 subscribers.

One of them is Heidi Blass, 46, who manages a massage business in St. Petersburg, Fla. In early 2017, she started receiving two or three unwanted calls a day and found that nothing she did would get them to stop—including blowing a whistle into the phone. She thinks the Do Not Call Registry is “almost a joke.” With Jolly Roger screening her calls, she finds that telemarketers now call her just a few times a week. She hasn’t had any laugh-out-loud funny recordings, but enjoys listening to Anderson’s robots waste telemarketers’ time. Her favorite is Salty Sally.

“She’s got this daughter that interrupts her, saying, ‘Mom, where are my leggings?’ It’s so subtle. At one point, the mom is like, ‘Did you check your brother’s room?’ ” Blass says. “There’s one guy who says, ‘Hold on, my dog just took a crap on the floor.’ It’s all done in a way that it sounds believable.”

Call Blockers and Smart Apps

Anderson wasn’t the first person to develop a chatbot to annoy telemarketers. One of the oldest and best-known such robots is Lenny, who has his own YouTube channel and a Reddit discussion group. His creator remains anonymous, and Lenny—a friendly but eccentric elderly man with an Australian accent—is more entertainment than business. There are more than 600 Lenny conversations posted online, some stretching up to an hour, with titles like “Kristi from Time Warner Cable REALLY wants to know how many TVs Lenny’s got in the house.”

Developers of smartphone apps are wading into the field of call-blocking. They don’t engage telemarketers in conversations the way Jolly Roger and Lenny do. Instead, they focus on developing lists of known telemarketing numbers, using data from third-party providers and reports from customers who download the apps. CTIA, a trade group of wireless companies, maintains a website list of robocall blockers that has reached 56 Android apps and 23 for the iPhone. Two of the best-regarded are Nomorobo ($1.99 a month) and PrivacyStar (99 cents a month).

There are new entrants all the time. TelTech, a New Jersey-based company, stumbled into the field because it already made apps that recorded calls and forwarded them. In late 2016, it launched RoboKiller, an iPhone app that blocks calls like most of the others but also answers them in order to analyze the telemarketer’s voice. It adds that “audio fingerprint” to an algorithm that uses machine learning to help improve its list of suspicious phone numbers. It plays a recording to try to keep the telemarketer on the line. In one, the recording of a male voice tells an unsuspecting telemarketer of plans to audition for America’s Got Talent and proceeds to belt out a shaky rendition of the chorus of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.” The singer then demands the telemarketer provide honest feedback.

RoboKiller costs $2.99 a month and has nearly 100,000 subscribers. TelTech hopes to debut an Android version in 2018, says Ethan Garr, the company’s vice president of product. He thinks using technology to analyze calls and collect suspicious numbers quickly is the most effective way to combat crafty and unscrupulous telemarketers. “They’re always one step ahead, so the only way you’re going to be able to beat them is to update the list in as close to real time as possible,” Garr says. “The FCC and FTC are doing the best they can, but they can’t find three guys in a hut in Asia.”

The phone companies themselves have begun trying to combat unwanted telemarketing. They formed a “Robocall Strike Force” last year to hammer out technical standards that help show the true origin of a phone call. They have pooled resources to track the source of suspicious calls. Those efforts have made call-blocking technologies more effective and helped authorities trace violators and punish them. Some of the telecoms have begun offering call-blocking to customers directly. AT&T said in April that it had blocked its one billionth robocall.

Kevin Rupy, vice president of law and policy with USTelecom, a trade association, believes private industry and government need to work together to reduce robocalls. “There is no silver bullet to solving this problem,” he says. “Everybody realizes that this is going to take a collective effort, a cooperative effort.”

The FCC is certainly doing its share. In November, it passed a rule allowing carriers to block calls from numbers they know are invalid. Pai, the FCC chairman, says the agency has beefed up its enforcement efforts and brought three big cases in 2017. In the biggest one, the FCC levied a $120 million fine against a Miami company accused of making 97 million calls in a three-month period in 2016—more than 1 million a day. FCC documents allege that the company would call with a recorded message claiming to offer discounted travel from Marriott, Expedia, or TripAdvisor, but if it happened to get a human on the line, it would route the call to a Mexican call center selling timeshares at resorts.

There were plenty of complaints about the scam. A Virginia medical-paging company said its network was being disrupted by the calls, potentially hampering its ability to page doctors and nurses in an emergency. TripAdvisor complained to the FCC, too, saying the calls were harming its image. The company passed along a voice message from a person who had received the robocall and wrongly believed it originated from TripAdvisor: “If I ever get a call like that again, I will contact the FCC and I will open the gates of hell on TripAdvisors. Never never never never call me like that again. Ever. Got it?”

The FTC has been busy, too. Since 2009, it has brought 33 cases against robocallers and levied $287 million in fines. Both agencies are trying to educate consumers about avoiding unwanted calls. They recommend checking with your carrier to evaluate options, using a call-blocking app, and, if you should happen to answer a telemarketer’s call, simply hanging up. Engaging with a telemarketer, they warn, only invites more calls.

Jolly Roger’s Anderson doesn’t necessarily agree with that last advice. He says he’d like nothing more than to spend his time building more and more robots to carry on long, rambling conversations with people trying to sell things over the phone. Maybe he’s naïve. Maybe telemarketers will always be with us. Maybe this technological arms race has no winner.

If nothing else, though, he says his experience has brightened his outlook: Anderson no longer feels dread when the phone rings. “It completely changes your attitude,” he says. “I never thought I would want telemarketers to call me.”

Tony Mecia is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.