What I’d like to do, however, is to record the entire call when something comes in on the annoy-a-tron. This is not only for my own amusement, but also so that I can judge how effective this is for keeping the tele-spammers on the phone as long as possible. Like you, I believe that if we can make this as painful and cost inneffective for them, they might start to rethink the whole intrusion thing that they are doing in the first place. But it really comes down to keeping metrics on call length, and tweaking the scripts to have them stay on the call as long as possible. I think you’ve done an awesome job of exposing some tricks to do this, and I’m looking to take this much further if I can.

Forgive my ignorance, but how are you recording the entire call? Is this something Asterisk can do easily?

I liked some of the ideas here, and I have few suggestions, from my own experiments in dealing with them “live.” There’s nothing that can replace live conversation for fun, but if you can fake it with software audio scripts somewhat it would be good. These should only be used when you’re sure there’s a telemarketer on the line that needs to be discouraged. Otherwise friends and innocent strangers may think you’re an idiot or have psychological problems. So here goes:

1. The interference play. Have a TV or radio blasting in the background, and fill every gap in the conversation with “what? ….. can you speak up? what?” then after a random silence “hold on, lemme turn down the [whatever device]” and just let it run. If you get enough calls you can monitor how long they stay on the line, on average, and adjust the script to talk again soon enough to keep them on as long as possible.

2. Speak gibberish. This is most fun live, but you can record yourself and others blabbing in some imaginary language, and build various sounding phrases. A polite, interrogative tone is best. Having another voice in the background doing the same thing makes it even more convincing.

3. The job interview. Until we get sufficient speech recognition and artificial intelligence, this is only possible to perform live. After a seemingly pliable, friendly introduction, say something like “hey you know my cousin used to do this stuff, and made a pretty good buck at it, but he said it was hard …” “So, uh, where are you guys actually located – what city?” “How about the hours? It must be [ ] PM in your time zone….” “Do you need special training for this?” “Are you guys hiring right now?”

4. The silent treatment. If CID indicates it’s a telemarketer for sure, go off-hook with silence. If they break the silence and offer a greeting, wait for the next silence and then play your standard message like “please add this phone number to your do not call list.” Then go silent for about 2 seconds, then “thank you” and hang up. Another variation of this is to just play FAX machine answering tones – really loud.

That’s all for now. I will study all of the stuff at your website and maybe be able to put something together. Thanks.