For quite a while now I’ve been getting tired of all the unsolicited spam/scam phone calls I’ve been receiving and started looking for an asterisk-based solution. (As part of my general telephony weirdness I run my own phone PBX, based on the open source Asterisk project, running on my linux box. I use it for various voicemail and call forwarding functions.) Time to use technology to fight back.
Turns out I’m not the only one who is getting a bunch of unwanted phonecalls. The excellent Lenny project provides a series of audio files which can be incorporated into Asterisk with some configuration work so that Lenny can talk to the telemarketers so I don’t have to. Lenny isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, indeed all he can really do is listen for short periods of silence in the conversation at the other end before he plays the next audiofile in sequence. Having said that, the design and implementation of the simple audio clips is genius personified. Huge props to Brian West, the man responsible.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’ve been running Lenny on my PBX for a while and keeping a blacklist of phone numbers. When one of the dodgy telemarketers calls, Lenny picks up the phone for me and deals with the telemarketers, or perhaps more accurately, the telemarketer has to deal with Lenny. This results in various recordings with varying degrees of hilarity, but I felt compelled to share today’s batch of four recordings FROM A SINGLE COMPANY! They were offering to rebuild Lenny’s website “from the scratch”. I was sure they’d rumbled Lenny towards the end of the 2nd call but he saved the situation heroically (if somewhat randomly, but that’s pretty much how he rolls). Speaking of rolling, if the telemarketer manages to make it all the way through Lenny’s pre-recordings, Rick Astley comes on to make it clear they’ve had their time wasted. You’d think that they might get the message, but these people called back 3 times (Mrs Bueller, 3 times)! They’re definitely getting suspicious by the 3rd call though; there’s certainly something wrong with Lenny but they can’t quite put their finger on it.
Here’s the collection. You should probably make yourself a cup of tea or pop a beer and make yourself comfortable. Lenny doesn’t always get to the point very fast and he’s a little hard of hearing so be prepared for some loud, exasperated telemarketers:
2 responses to “Lenny rules!”
As a followup, they called again the next day! They’ve clearly figured they’re not talking to a human but they seem a bit intrigued by Lenny. Perhaps they figured it had to be some sort of super-smart AI and are a bit embarassed to find they’d previously talked to a simple audio sequence for 8 minutes, twice!, before getting suspicious.
Warning: some of the language is a bit salty. Here’s the call. (But you should probably check out the earlier calls first.)
Can anyone translate the non-english parts of this call (and calls 3 and 4 in the original post)?
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