My plans to kill the Telemarketer!
Like most of you, I have a phone line at my house. I don’t use it a lot because I have my cell phone… the normal story. So, on my home phone I have exactly zero special calling features. I have no caller-id, no voicemail, nothing. Even though I’m on the National Do-not-call list, I still get telemarketers calling me. The most annoying one is when they ask “Is James there?” this happens several times a day. By conservative estimates I’ve received several hundred calls like this. You’d be annoyed too, I’m sure.
Do you recall a $40 product marketed as the Telezapper that plays an error tone prior to ringing your phone line? This will trick most predictive dialers (telemarketer auto-dial systems) to hang up before your phone ever rings. I want to do the same thing, but have even more protection, and I want to built it myself.
I work from home, and get business related calls on this line, so I answer them all. I smile every time because I never know whether I’m going to hear “Is James…” or “Hi Adrian this is…” after I say hello. So I’m thinking of setting up a simple counter-measure. I plan to use the Open Source trixbox CE software on a very simple PC system that has no hard drive. It will have a PCI card with an FXS and FXO port on it so I have somewhere to connect the phone line, and somewhere to connect my cordless multi-handset phone to.
When I get a call, the trixbox will answer the call, play the error tone, and say “Please press 1 for Adrian, and press 2 for everyone else.”. If they don’t press anything the tones and message will repeat and then hang up after a polite “Goodbye!”. My phone will never ring because the trixbox would have answered my line silently and played the digitally generated error tones and WAV format audio message. Each time it successfully traps a telemarketer it will email me to tell me so!
Everyone who is calling me will press 1 and my cordless phone(s) will immediately start to ring. If they press 2 it will give them options for my wife, or for “James”. If they select the option for “James” it will play “Please remove me from your call list. There is no James at this phone number!”, followed by a hangup.
If anyone else out there is interested in the exact plans and specific details of how I build this, please let me know, and I’ll document it here for you. I’m happy to supply the configuration files, and full instructions and specifications for how to build your own. If you ask nicely I’ll even include video of the hardware setup. Let me know!
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What an awesome plan. Yes please share the details, I’m sure the devil is in there.
I’ve wanted to build something like that for a while! I wanted to add filters to immediately dump calls that came from blocked or 800 numbers too. If/when you get this going, share your contexts?
And, curiously, how do you plan to run tbCE with no HDD? Live CD style?
Thanks for your comment Brian. Setting up a blacklist is rather simple too. Maybe I’ll make a simple interface so you can call an “extension” that lets you add the CID of the last caller to the blacklist automatically… or better yet listen during calls for a DTMF code that will blacklist the CURRENT call and hang up on it with a pre-recorded greeting along the lines of “Please remove my number from your calling list. We are not interested in your call. Please do not call back.” I had a similar setup once before and found it to be highly effective.
I’ve been planning to simply boot the system from one of those cheap USB flash drives. Since it’s not going to get a whole lot of usage that should work nicely. Chances are I’ll simply set up a LiveCD distribution and copy it to the USB device, then set it to be bootable in the BIOS. You can get these devices now with reasonable capacity for under $10 which is cheaper than any hard drive. With a small ATOM CPU I should be able to make an affordable system that requires no moving parts, so it’s likely to run for a very long time, and not use much electrical power.
If it works nicely and there’s interest I’ll make a whole bunch of the USB boot drives and sell them for my cost plus any donation you feel appropriate. Just comment here to register your interest. If you don’t want your post to be public, just say so in your post and I’ll refrain from putting it on the blog.