My neice found, by accdent, how to stop one of those phone robots cold. She's been working at the Alldata call center for a few weeks, and for some odd reason when she answered the phone tonight she started to say "Thank you for calling..." at which point the robot said sorry and hung up.

Maybe it has some kind of AI to detect when it calls business lines? Weird.

I'm not sure how the phone system in the US works, but here in the UK a good tip is to hit the recall button, that should give you dial tone and put the person/robot on hold, then hang up the phone, the exchange will ring you back so you can take the call on hold, don't answer it, after a few rings it gives up and the call is dropped

Although your idea sounds pretty good for live cold callers too.

Cheers

Cris.

Why not just hang up in the first place?

I get bothered by junk FAX machines, so I keep a list of blocked numbers in my VOIP control panel. Obviously these calls have to come in with valid CallerID for the system to sort and deny them.

I read about a cool trick using the 3-tone beep (attached) on an answer machine. The trick is to record the 3-tone beep on the first second of your answer machine message, and then start the actual message. A robot that calls a number and "hears" the beep will immediately disconnect and the computer system will log the number as being disconnected.

EDIT: This page does a better job of explaining the concept.

Ooo. Now that is awesome. I'm gonna do that on my answering machine.

???

Other than these political ads, which will certainly stop by tomorrow, I have gotten no telemarketing calls since a few weeks after registering on the Do Not Call list.

Yeah, I had one of those recently, too. >:(

Took way too much effort on my part to resolve it.

There is also a box that will add the tone before as soon as you pick up the phone. The Telezapper is still available at Radio Shack. I suppose it's slightly less annoying to pick up to a dead line than a live telemarketer.

Actually, I had one of those telezapper thingies. It works quite well. Apparently, the beep it makes tells the computer calling you not to any more. My repeat calls dropped significantly after I installed it. The downside is that it makes a beep whenever ANY call is made, which can be annoying.