Most of the spam calls I get these days are just silence. I'll answer them occasionally and just listen, but even after 5-10 seconds no one says anything. Who benefits from that? I really don't get it.
Spoiler Alert: Don't read below if you don't want the podcast episode ruined.
You're not the one being scammed it's the telco.
From the episode:
JAMES: The way that the toll-free industry works is that it's a reverse payment system, right? So you have a toll free number, I call you, I don’t pay. Right? The--the remote end pays.
PJ: So-- so that I knew. But what I didn’t know is that when a company has a toll free number and they pay the phone company a dollar or whatever, the phone company takes that dollar, and shares it with every other phone company that helped make the connection.
[MUSIC]
PJ: So like I’m making this up but if I call Jodie right now, I’ll place the call and it’ll go to like an AT & T tower near me, and then a Verizon Tower in Manhattan, and then over to a Sprint tower to New Jersey, to Jodie.
JAMES: So there’s 1, 2, 3 hops down the chain. Each one of those, you know, for a 1 dollar phone call, is getting maybe ten cents, right? Carrier 2 is getting ten cents. Carrier 3 is getting ten cents.
PJ: So, it’s actually even less money than that. But, there’s so many of these calls happening every single day, that even though the phone companies might just be dividing fractions of penny each time, those fractions of pennies add up to like millions of dollars.
ALEX: Right.
PJ: And so what happened a few years ago apparently, is some brilliant person was like, "Huh, I would love to take some of that money." And what they did was go to some shady telecom company somewhere, like Crazy Eddie’s Phone Service and they were like, "Listen, I am going to place a ton of 1-800 calls though you, and when you get paid for them, share that money with me."
JAMES: So, the more phone calls I can make, and the longer that those phone calls stay up, the more money that I make.
PJ: OK, so how does that get us to spooky phone calls from nowhere
JAMES: Aha! So, let’s think about that, right?
PJ: OK.
JAMES: I send out a bunch of phone calls that are just silent, right? It takes you what, a second, two seconds. “Hello hello, damn it.” Hang up the phone, you’re done, you're gone. So how do you keep people on the phone, right? You appeal to their curiosity.
PJ: Right.
I do the same. My guess is that a robot is waiting for enough sound before it starts it's pitch. So if you answer, don't say anything and little noise is passing into the receiver on your phone they don't detect enough sound to start.
Just a guess because a lot of others I get just start babbling away as soon as I hit answer. I guess those detect the pick up and don't rely on an actual voice answering.
Yes. I almost set up a "phone center" with the OSS asterisk package on a raspberry-pi. Basically the raspberry takes the call and waits for a few second silently, before forwarding the call to your phone (and only then it starts ringing). This way, robocallers hang up and your phone never rings.
Instead of waiting, you can also send control sounds to make the robocall believe the call has ended.
Often they are waiting for you to say something before they start. I'm not exactly sure why but I think the strategy is to make it sound more like a real phone call.
