[tehitype]

I've recieved a lot of forex related telemarketing calls the past two years (not robo, but imagine it will also hit EU eventually) because I was silly enough to input my actual number at some platform 5+ years back. I've tried several approaches reasoning with those individuals, mostly using the logic that I will NEVER buy anything from them because im simply not interested in the topic, but also a few using foul language. Always same result: more bullshit politely accompanied by "sir".

More recently I've recieved a lot of calls from regular people "calling me back". I reached out to my provider a few times, especially about the spoofing, but they claim theres nothing they can do, which I highly doubt.

I was a bit inspired by Cory Doctorow's "Red team blues" wherein the protagonist carries a burner, but has her main number behind an Asterisk server forwarding allowlisted numbers to the active burner.

Anyone know of anything like this? Ideally very DIY and FLOSS?

I imagine you could do some cool stuff with Whisper and LLMs, either wasting their time (like lennytroll mentioned elsewhere), but even better some autonomous bastion asking the caller to explain their reason for calling and letting the owner validate the answer through speech-to-text in an app, then decide wether to let it through or to "let me tell you in great detail about my grandchilds vacation to Mauritius"-land.

It's a weird opposite world we live in where companies hide behind endless teleprompts, but citizens have no such shield

[ramses0]

Twilio is kindof trivial, they have a GUI-builder thing that might let you do "something like that". There was another discussion w.r.t. "90-y/o parents are getting scammer calls 24x7" and they implemented a "most-recent-number blacklist" along with the usual "allowlist". It's genius!

Basically: if ( in_allowlist() || called_twice_in_a_row() ) { allow_call() } else { respond_with_beep_beep_problem_please_retry_your_call() && hangup() }

...all humans (eg: doctors offices, appointment schedulers/verifiers, etc) are like: "huh, phone system must be f'd up right now" and call right back. All mechanically dialed spammers just $PHONE += 1 and continue dialing. Son kept an eye on the "called twice" and added them to the allowlist (or maybe you could just auto-add if they ever call twice, and then validate / name / prune new entries once a week or so?)

[tehitype]

Simple and likely very effective, even with non-robo callers whom I have never experienced calling twice.

I am using https://gitlab.com/xynngh/YetAnotherCallBlocker right now, but my country wildcards doesn't protect me against spoofed domestic calls - Forking and extending with this approach might work! TY

[ironlake]

I have started answering the phone with, "Thanks for calling the Labor Organizing Hotline, how can we help you unionize your workplace today?"

The hope is that it results in some self-reflection for the caller, though it hasn't reduced the number of calls.

[tehitype]

I had a very long chat with one of the telemarketers once, trying my best to be very empathic and appealing to her humananity. I eventually hung up feeling defeated since she did an amazing job always defaulting to her agenda, and not giving in to my hippy svada in a very polite manner.

I'd be curious to hear how your approach works out. Ultimate best scenario would be to get completely removed from their lists - but I've almost given up hope on talking sense, and my provider, leaving Fire versus Fire.

[ironlake]

>best scenario would be to get completely removed from their lists

I don't think there is any action a consumer can take to reduce the number of calls or get removed from a company's lists. There is no incentive for the company and the person who calls is as much a victim of capitalism in that moment as you are. Just two people wasting each other's time as a result of the operation of a corporate machine.

[dqv]

It's really easy to set up FreeSWITCH to do that. I prefer FreeSWITCH to Asterisk because the XML config is way easier to grok. FreeSWITCH peeps also made Signalwire and it's pretty nice.

One problem with this method is that your burner will still accept incoming calls from any number, so you'd lose caller ID information if you want to make sure only your VOIP server can call you. Of course you can just set it up to send you the caller ID through some other channel - like a text message.

But anyway you can make a really simple lua script that looks at a text file to see if the number is allowed, then forward it to your burner. In FreeSWITCH you just do something like <action application="set" data="allowed=${lua(allowlist.lua)}"/> and act on that variable accordingly. Then you can use whatever command line tool you prefer to add and remove numbers from the file.

If you need some help, drop a burner email and I can reach out.

[tehitype]

FreeSWITCH and SignalWire looks great. I'll give it a shot during the weekend.

I guess I'd have to decide wether the bastion should forward or channel/tunnel the call. My knowledge in telco and VOIP is very limited, do you know if there's any way to identify a number one has been forwarded to? If so, complete isolation and using some other channel to transmit the caller id would be preferable.

That is really kind of you to offer, thanks a bunch!

[dqv]

>My knowledge in telco and VOIP is very limited, do you know if there's any way to identify a number one has been forwarded to?

Do you mean like the calling party being able to find out what your burner number is?

I think that information could be revealed if you do a SIP refer. To be extra careful, you'd want to answer the call on FreeSWITCH/Asterisk and then bridge it to your burner number through whatever gateway (e.g. Signalwire, Flowroute, Twilio, whatever SIP provider you choose). The calling party will just see that they're calling your bastion.

It can also be revealed if you have the default voicemail set up on your burner, since a lot of voicemail systems will read the number out to the caller.

[marcus0x62]

> More recently I've recieved a lot of calls from regular people "calling me back". I reached out to my provider a few times, especially about the spoofing, but they claim theres nothing they can do, which I highly doubt.

Why would your SP be able to do something about someone else on another network spoofing your number and calling a random third-party that is also possibly on a different network?

The whole problem here is there is nothing in the legacy phone network to validate that calling party information is accurate (at least, between service providers.)