NoMoRobo

Nomo Robo is turning out to be a tremendous service.  Some days it may block up to 10 calls.  Other days it's very quiet.  Great service, works like a champ!!  I wish I could add it to my biz phone.

Tim R from what I've read they are hoping to offer the program to businesses, that is how they hope to make money from the program and keep it free for residential phones. They figure it would be cost effective for a company not to have their phones tied up with bogus calls. Time is money after all.

As I understand it NoMoRobo is available now to business customers but whether it will work or not depends on the phone system being used. There is a long thread about this at dslreports.com. Google "NoMoRobo caution dslreports". I am quite pleased with how NoMoRobo has blocked 56 of 61 robocalls over 1 month on my home phone. I reported the 5 unblocked ones to them. Somewhat less than their claimed 99% blockage but I'll take it.

I'm personally wondering how long this is going to last. There are already people in these forums talking about cases of spoofed number of innocent people (http://consumerist.com/2014/03/18/florida-den ... y-telemarketer/ for instance), using your own number as the caller id, and spoofing local numbers.  I've had 1 just today which was XXX-XXX-nnnn where the XXX-XXX was the area code and exchange of my number.

The Dentist could lose the ability to call his own clients for appointment reminders, for instance, because he's gotten on NoMoRobo's list. Perhaps they have a plan for that, and the collateral damage is very small right now.

The only problem I have with NoMoRobo is that it doesn't do enough to punish the telemarketers.  The hangup costs them such a small amount, if anything, that there's no/little financial or resource risk to getting listed.  The people blocking are highly unlikely to purchase anyway, so NoMoRobo is almost a benefit for them by screening against that demographic for them.  What I would love to see, although there would be more expense, is rather than have it hang up the call, to actively answer it and hook it up to a series of "Hello This is Lenny" type bots for the live agents to interact and pitch.  You would need a variety of differently voiced and scripted 'AI's so it wouldn't be immediately detected.  There are a few people that run Lenny's and they can tie up a telemarketer for 5, 10 minutes, and sometimes for over 30 minutes.

This would have two effects.  First, it ties up the relatively few live agents (compared to the massive numbers of calls they can place) and restricts their sales. Second, if you look for "autodialer throttling" and other similar terms, if the agents are occupied, the autodialers for most providers stop/reduce calling.  This reduces gross number of calls placed, since they prefer to not have potential leads get dead air if possible. This can reduce the total number of outbound calls by hundreds of calls per agent/minute or more which means everyone's phone is bothered less.

If I were using the NoMoRobo service, I would not want their equipment playing chat games with incoming calls on my telephone number, as it might aggravate a legitimate caller if the service grabbed the call. Businesses also don't want any legitimate calls discouraged.

I have read that NoMoRobo has honeypot numbers, and I think it would be a good idea that new honeypot numbers can be added that been dropped and abandoned by people trying to escape malicious callers. The honey pot numbers can be the ones with the Lenny bots.

I have this idea that senior citizen centers would be the ideal honeypot listeners. Give each person an identity and scripts for the type of call and they could have all kinds of fun with the criminal element scammers. Volunteer work for the lulz.

now we are attacking all sorts of call blockers and filters?  Yes, i suppose in your world we should do away with all of them, answer each and every phone call no matter how inconvenient it might be for us, just to put these people out of business.  What happens though when people do answer the call and fall for the scam?  How much money does the caller lose then?  Oh that's right, that never happens according to you.

You seem to have not really read the post very well.  No where did I say to get rid of the service.  However, I can see that as telemarketers escalate their use of spoofed numbers, there are potential problems that can occur.  If you want to ignore that possibility, that's fine. It doesn't matter to me. I've dealt with enough problems with email RBL lists to know that while useful, they don't come without problems.

And again, you immediately jump to the same strawman argument as you always do.

"If I were using the NoMoRobo service..." As a business or residential?  As a business, I can see a possible reluctance to use NoMoRobo out of concern for blacklisting a legitimate call.  Whether it's a Lenny or just hangup, it still could aggravate a legitimate caller.  At this point, I haven't seen any stats on false-positives, but it's very possible at this point there aren't any.  But we've seen similar things with email RBL lists, and should a number get improperly listed, what is the procedure?  Any maybe there should be an option to just hang up or re-route the call.

Honeypots are good candidates.  However, I think having senior citizens handling the calls could be a bad idea, unless it was monitored.  After all, many scams target that exact demographic (home medical alerts, etc).

trying to model myself after you when you say this "And again, you immediately jump to the same strawman argument as you always do."

really advocate engaging people such as this?  https://800notes.com/forum/ta-d0410db8e3e1b0e ... georgia-prisons
Criminals who obviously have people on the outside and from what it looks like put hits out on people they don't like?  You would seriously suggest that an ill informed unprepared person (one who would come here and take your advice as gospel since you present it that way) go up against people such as this?  People that might know the name and address of the person they are calling?

an excellent point

I am eager to see the response.

There was an interview with  Nomorobo's  founder in which he said that they have been testing software that ties up the salespeople with bots, but have not made it a routine function, and he actually feels sorry for the schlubs who are often just underpaid drones trying to make a living. I suspect though, if the company gets enough hardware resources to be able to use it on all calls, that may change.
What he reveals about their software is that because they have enough subscribers now, they use pattern recognition to distinguish real callers from a scammer who is spoofing a number.  The Software can identify a number or caller ID that is spoofed because it sees that the number is dialing someone every 10 seconds for hours on end.
I also suspect there are other tricks that Foss doesn't talk about. I don't know much about VOIP technology, but there may be metadata that gets embedded in these calls in order to get through, the way that digital photos have all kinds of data embedded. It may be that they are extracting the IP addresses of the call originators and blocking any calls from those addresses. I would think that if they don't use some trick like that, then telemarketers could defeat screening by doing something relatively obvious like simply running through their list of legitimate target phone numbers, spoofing those numbers for the caller IDs.
What I do know is that somehow my installation has worked flawlessly. All robocalls have been dumped and all valid ones have come through. The automated calls from medical providers make it. Real people with "unavailable" caller ID  make it through, robocalls with the same caller ID don't.

Yeah, I know how Aaron feels regarding those "schlubs".  I had a call go to Lenny yesterday and the nice, polite Google listing girl spoke with him for almost 3 minutes before she hung up.  She listened patiently and even offered to remove Lenny from her list. She had a very real MN/ND/SD accent.

"What I do know is that somehow my installation has worked flawlessly."  Glad to hear it, which is why i fail to understand why some posters here want to do away with it.  Maybe they are the ones making the calls?