Help Uncle Sam stamp out Telemarketers

[jim hardy]

Federal Trade Comission is asking for public help in coming up with technology to fight robocalls

which would make one an instant folk hero

and there's a nice cash prize too.

http://robocall.challenge.gov/

 

[berkeman]

Any ideas on how to actually block them? Other than not allowing calls without caller ID (which I can't do since some emergency calls I get are from blocked numbers), and having a database of the phone numbers used by robocallers, what else can you do?

 

[dlgoff]

It would be nice to see one of our PF members come up with something.

 

[berkeman]

We could do it as a group project, and the $50k prize could fund our Aruba trip!

 

[Bill Simpson]

Suppose:
1. The FCC mandates that the phone companies implement *99 used immediately after a phone call to report a do-not-call telemarketer violation.
2. That *99 automatically reports the actual real phone connection the call was made from directly to the FCC. The phone company can get this and Caller ID isn't it.
3. An FCC scoring system determines when enough (a small number of) *99 for a connection have been counted.
4. The FCC scoring system sends an automated disconnect order to the phone company providing that phone connection and 90 seconds later the telemarketing robot has no dial tone.
5. Telemarketing calls from other countries which have reached their *99 quota are dropped at the border by all phone companies, but it is not at all clear they can really determine the actual source of a call from outside the country and this may just result in outsourcing all our telemarketing robots, leaving thousands of unemployed telemarketing robots in this country.

Two rules to remember.
1. ANY new service will be immediately abused.
2. Nobody EFFECTIVELY plans for rule 1.

So any phone connection abusing this service by making false *99 reports more than a small handful of times will be dealt with in exactly the same way that DNC violations are handled now, half a dozen years of delay in taking someone to court for some fine that probably won't ever be collected.

Paying a bounty to people for reporting valid DNC violations would be optional.

So how can this be improved and made more likely to win the contest?