Success! Telemarketing calls/yr reduced to zero! (Score 1)

I put all my phone numbers on the "Do Not Call Registry" in the US, and have experienced a great reduction in the number of telemarketing calls, but, the Do Not Call registry does not apply to Charitable institutions, and a few others, and the volume of these calls has grown exponentially over the months... it seems the charities sell each other their call lists, and if you give anything to one, soon you will have them ALL calling at regular intervals.

I've been playing with Asterisk for a couple of years now. I've implemented every privacy option in my dialplan, and have finished the coding of the call filtering option, and had it incorporated into the 2.x releases.

First the 3-tone is played (the da-dee-doo that precedes "The number you have called is no longer in service!", if no CallerID is present.

Next, if no CallerID is present, and the autodialer has not hung up, the calling party is forced to supply a phone number, or the call is terminated, and if they are stupid, and give my number instead of theirs, the call is "terminated with prejudice".

Then, they get a menu, where they must choose the person with which they would like to converse. They get music on hold, and if no answer, they are thrown into voicemail.

One of the first menu options they are presented with is a number to press if they are telemarketers. This option runs them into what I titled the "Telemarketer Torture Script". (See http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+Telemarkete r+Torture)

I have complete CDR logs of the incoming and outgoing calls, and have totalled up how many calls and from what sources, and at what stage each call was terminated.

And I found that each measure I implemented removed a fairly small percentage of the callers, with the total result that I have not received any telemarketing calls or requests for donations in almost two years now.

The single most effective measure is the menu prompts. It defeats autodialers, which aren't programmed to answer prompts. It somehow defeats all the rest of the live callers, who don't seem to have the courage to ignore the telemarketing option, and choose a person. Only once has a charity ever been brave enough to actually select my extension, and in that case, all they did was thank me for past contributions, and hung up.

My conclusion is, that if you truly want to eliminate unsolicited calls from your business/home, you need to implement a simple IVR menu system.

A more detailed explanation of the privacy measures are outlined in http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-cvs/200 5-July/006992.html

And, some details of my research results are in: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2 004-September/062571.html

Best of luck!