[asterisk-users] Area code 757 "Car warranty" calls

[Cary Fitch]

Three or four area codes, all spoofed ANI.
We absorb their war dialing for about 2,000,000 unassigned cell numbers with
two Asterisk server which do nothing else.  

Since they are war dialing cell phone numbers, they obviously don't care
about any rules.  Trying to get any info from the people who respond to "1
for more information" is fruitless.  They will give no information about the
company and they or the person at the next desk claims to be a "supervisor"
who will relay our "concerns" to the management.

We eliminated the Special Information Tones, as time wasters.  We get 10
calls or so per second. Hard to say... console is a blur on verbose 7.  We
do put them in a black list when we get a call, but that is manual process
and unless we get several calls on our own numbers... that slides.  They
change ANI often anyway.  (Another reason we know they are pirates)

Our attorney says there is a law pending to make it illegal to "spoof an ANI
to defraud".  It wouldn't affect "legitimate ANI manipulations" such as
making all calls appear to come from a main corp. number, etc. It would make
illegal setting an ANI to some attorney's office or some insurance company
to defraud the callee.  I don't know if it would make use of bogus numbers
to hide identity illegal.

We had a long chat with an AT&T traffic admin, this week, about our short
hold times, which turned into a discussion of warranty calls.  They are
aware of the problem, but say they can't do anything, because the calls come
from other carriers.

We don't do CDR in asterisk.  We do in a Lucent switch ahead of Asterisk.
The Lucent switch produced 540 megs of "warranty" CDR files in February.

In short, someone needs to find those people and explain things to them
clearly and with extreme prejudice.

/rant off
YMMV
Cary



-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Ronny Julian
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 8:11 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: [asterisk-users] Area code 757 "Car warranty" calls


757 area code right? They have been hitting my cell twice a day. I 
always press one and go through the process telling them I have a 1959 
Edsel dump truck that needs alot of work and how perfect this is going 
to work for me... Either that or something else to waste their time.

Their ANI info is spoofed too.

Cary Fitch wrote:
> I don't think the telemarketers care about them.  Right now we get
thousands
> of "Car warranty" phone calls everyday, now for months, and given that
they
> are illegally war dialing cell phone numbers, I don't think they listen
for
> the Special Information Tones.
>
>   


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