The Gloves Are Coming OFF!

As many of you may have noticed, this blog has been silent for a while. The calls died down for me, life got busy, and fighting overseas pharmacy telemarketers dropped on my priority list.

I do check the statistics, and despite my lack of posting, many people are finding the blog. I want to remind everyone of the good work being done over at http://whocalled.us in creating what I think is the most useful log of incoming call numbers out there. (Note: I am in no way affiliated with them and am not sure of what they think of my efforts).

BUT, it is time to ratchet things up again. My previous idea of creating an army of auto-dial zombies, using VMWare (which creates numerous virtual machines within a machine) is now officially resurrected. All I need to do is assemble the various operating systems, and I can have ten autodial machines dialing them non-stop.

On the news front, there doesn't seem to be much action. Cell phone carriers still ignore us, so for now, the battle is back on. I will be posting with more frequency in the coming days.

For now, check out this experiment. You can't hear it well, but in the future I'm going to try to get the choicest moments from my calls and post the audio. I was conferencing them all together and annoying the crap out of them.

Silence my telephonic oppressors

Here's a tip for all of you out there with cell phones. I wish I had thought of this sooner, but even I, the Mad Genius Pharmacy Vigilante, can overlook things from time to time.

As you all know, in this blog I have blasted the cell phone companies for being behind in providing us the technological tools to solve this problem. Those of you with landlines have numerous options, as there are a myriad of devices that can be used to block telemarketing phone calls. Those of you with Nextel can set your phone to only accept calls from people already in your phone book. But people like me, who choose Verizon as a provider, have limited options.

Besides the usage of air time, the most annoying aspect of getting these calls is the fact that you must jump to get your phone. If you're like me and you keep your phone on at work, nothing is more annoying than being in the next cubicle, hearing your cell phone ring, and finding a mysterious number on the caller ID. For me, 90% of the time that means it's a pharmacy.

Well, my workaround involves tediously adding each phone number to a contact in my Verizon VX8300. The first entry is simply called "Pharm", and I've set it to silently ring. This won't eliminate the annoying call waiting beeps when I'm on the phone, but at least I won't be jumping off the couch and running into my office while I'm watching some enormously important TV show.

In the picture above, you'll see the entry I've created, while in the background the various visitors to this site are a thousand points of light. Or, in my mind, a thousand aggravated people who wonder what figure in business or government will take notice of our problem.

After all, the dinosaurs in Congress passed the Do Not Call list, but as we all know, that only stops a few people. Technology, and the vigilante use of autodialers, is our only hope.

Riga Calling!

After several weeks of quiet, the calls began anew this week, but with an interesting twist. They said they want to call "to confirm the shipping address before they send out the medication". That's funny, I didn't remember ordering anything!

And, in another interesting twist, they said they were calling from "LV Riga" pharmacy. Immediately the name rang a bell - I had screwed them out of about $150 around two years ago.

It was the only time I tried this trick, but when they were relentlessly calling me in early 2005 I decided to take a risk. I needed some ambien at the time, as I was having trouble sleeping, so I placed an order with LV Riga. They were one of the most relentless callers at the time, and I figured I was already on every list anyway, so my calls couldn't possibly increase.

I received my medication about three weeks later (after they promised me a two day delivery) so I decided to dispute the charge with my credit card. Instead of saying that I received it later than promised, I just told them I never received it at all. They investigated, and issued me a full credit.

Now, this is certainly a tactic that involves financial risk. That was the only time I ever did it; I thought that by going through the process I would find out some details about who, or what company, was calling me so relentlessly. (Of course, there were the additional side benefits of getting some free medication, and swindling them out of some cash.)

I was surprised to find out that the credit card company had very little information on this vendor. Either that, or they were unwilling to share. If anyone has any information on how credit card companies process these transactions, I would be fascinated to learn.

Do they know exactly who is charging me when I place an order like this? All I know is that Riga is the capital of Latvia. It doesn't exactly seem like a hotbed of pharmacy telemarketing.

Congress moves to outlaw Caller ID spoofing

I came across this interesting article in regards to caller ID spoofing:

Congress Moves to Outlaw Caller ID Spoofing

While it may have some effect on my efforts, I find that most pharmacies that block my number from a common VoIP client do so only temporarily. Overall I have to say it sounds like a reasonable idea, though.

Finally, as part of my internet browsing about the industry, I came across a guy who has taken the legislative route to try to stop calls. Not only does he go out and sue telemarketers (good luck serving papers in Bangalore) but he also organizes petitions to Congress.

Frankly, I think all of that is a waste of time. It comes back to the cell phone carriers, it always comes back to them - they could implement a system whereby you block calls from particular numbers. Most of the time I find it is one particular pharmacy that starts dialing and persists for months.

If only I could call Verizon Wireless and say, "block this number", or "block 800, 888, and 866 numbers and send them all to voicemail"...

When Telemarketers Collide

One of the interesting phenomena I've noticed is the odd conversations that can occur when two offshore telemarketers end up randomly connected to each other.

While it is immensely fun to autodial them 1000 times in a row, sometimes when I've got a couple of minutes to kill, I'll conference them with each other manually and try to get them conversing. Usually this takes a little effort; reps may answer at different times, their proficiency in English may be of varying degrees, they may hang up pretty quickly, or one will silently listen for a few seconds before simply hanging up on the other and moving on.

But when the stars line up and they are actually communicating with each other, the same bizarre scenario has played out a half dozen times: one of the reps will begin to order from the other. They'll then get halfway through the fake order process and suddenly hang up. They never get any specific information, like prices, so there's no indication that they do this for any useful reason. It just seems like they've gone into some hypnotized state. I can't explain it. Maybe they really do need a refill, but come to the sudden realization that they can just go back to the inventory area at their own call center and help themselves.

And what may be even more bizarre is that they never seem to think that maybe someone has conferenced them together as a prank or a joke. They never attempt to even ask the most basic inquisitive question about why they've been conferenced with some other pharmacy telemarketer for the 64th time today. Wouldn't you at some point try to get to the bottom of the situation if there were actually a strange live voice on the other end of the line, reading from roughly the same script, and that voice was asking if you needed something?

Maybe something like this:

Rep # 1 Hi, this is USSecureNetHealthWebRefillPills, how can I help you?
Rep # 2 Hi, this is AmericaMedHealthPillRx Services, how can I help you?
Rep # 1 I believe you called me.
Rep # 2 No actually you called me.
Rep # 1 Well this is the 64th time this has happened today, who did you say you worked for?
Rep # 2 I refill prescription medications for AmericaMedHealthPillRx Services
Rep # 1 Wow, wait, I do the same thing for USSecureNetHealthWebRefillPills!
Rep # 2 No shit, I think you're three streets away.
Rep # 1 Well how the hell does this keep happening? It's been happening all day.
Rep # 2 I have no idea, but it really is fucked up.
Rep # 1 Yeah, it is. Let's tell our managers. We have to do something, block the number, something! It's driving me nuts-- so nuts I think I gotta go have a drink down at the (insert liquor establishment).
Rep # 2 Okay, I'll meet you there.

I mean, c'mon. Are you telling me that they know so little English that they can't accomplish at least part of the above conversation?

It hasn't happened, not even once.

Spoof my caller ID!

As I continue my vigilante journey, I am coming to the realization that my army is fighting with muskets.

What I need, what we need, is to upgrade to the Sherman Tank of weapons - a call system with spoofed caller ID. From what I hear, there's an open source phone system called Asterisk which runs on Linux. I don't know much about Asterisk or Linux, but I do know you can set your caller ID to whatever you want, so that has certainly piqued my interest.

This will get past one of the countermeasures I've outlined below - blocking me based on my area code. Not all the pharmacies are doing it, and the ones that are seem to be turning it on and off, but changing my caller ID on the fly would seem to solve this problem.

Imagine if I could devise my script to show random numbers on their end. Now that is the kind of tool we want in our arsenal.

I will keep you updated on my progress.

Today's Trick

As I watch people from all over the U.S. come to this site, I will post additional tricks as they come to me.

But first I want to address the question - "why don't you just change your phone number?" Like I said in an earlier post, that's a huge pain in the ass for me. Not only that, but as others have posted on http://whocalled.us, anyone can become a victim of this - even those who have never ordered anything. I feel like I am making a difference in a small way and that this issue needs attention from somebody - the cell phone carriers! They are the key.

Second, changing my number means that a dingy third world call center can force us to change our phone numbers at any time. That means they win, and I'm certainly too stubborn to allow that.

Lastly, this is fun. While I was war dialing a pharmacy the other night from VoIPStunt, and a different caller ID was showing up every third call, I heard one rep say to his manager "look at this guy! I tell you, he is good!" That brought a pretty big smile to my face.

Now, today's tip. I have noticed that when you call back, some telemarketers simply put you on hold and never answer. This is especially true after hours. And I also know that for my own IT business, 800 number calls are 7.4 cents a minute if I go over my monthly allotment.

So what I did today was pick a particular one that never seems to answer and call them from Skype and VoIPStunt; on VoIPStunt I conferenced them to themselves three times. I let these calls reach their maximum 60 minutes six times on VoIPStunt, and Skype let me stay on three hours at a time twice. (60 x 6 x 3) + 360 = around $106.

Maybe they have a cheaper plan than I do, but I can't help but imagine I cost them some money today.