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  • Who profits from wrecking the phone system?

    From Joy Beeson@21:1/5 to All on Fri Dec 8 19:43:02 2023
    Recently, I got two phone spams from live people in one day.

    For a week or two a while ago, real people predominated, which led me
    to wonder why someone who went to the enormous expense of hiring real
    people to make calls -- even if you do something equivalent to
    rounding them up at gunpoint, you have to provide a bowl of rice and a
    place to sleep -- why wouldn't someone who is using real people
    economise on their expensive time by filtering duplicate numbers out
    of the sucker list?

    Any script kiddie could write a program that would filter out
    duplicates quickly and with no effort, and there must be dozens of
    existing programs that are free or easy to steal.

    It's hard to believe that calling the same person several times a day
    would generate a significant amount of income

    Some of it could be explained by hundreds of people buying the same
    robot and the same mailing list, but when it's the same live person,
    it has to be the same spammer.

    The techiques employed are *much* more efficient at disrupting
    communications than at harvesting bank-account numbers. I'm becoming
    more and more convinced that what they are doing is what they are
    being paid to do.

    But who would be better off if there were no phone system?

    --
    Joy Beeson
    joy beeson at centurylink dot net

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Charles Packer@21:1/5 to Joy Beeson on Sat Dec 9 08:33:09 2023
    On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 19:43:02 -0500, Joy Beeson wrote:


    Some of it could be explained by hundreds of people buying the same
    robot and the same mailing list, but when it's the same live person, it
    has to be the same spammer.


    It comes down to the question of whether hundreds of people buying
    the same robot and the same mailing list _and_hiring_the_same_caller_
    is transcendentally more weird than hundreds of people merely buying
    the same robot and the same mailing list...

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Dorothy J Heydt@21:1/5 to jbeeson@invalid.net.invalid on Thu Dec 14 02:48:39 2023
    In article <lrd7nihr6ive173tk94jlbb1kbra2agbft@4ax.com>,
    Joy Beeson <jbeeson@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
    Any script kiddie could write a program that would filter out
    duplicates quickly and with no effort, and there must be dozens of
    existing programs that are free or easy to steal.

    [Hal Heydt]
    Standard Linux/unix utility found on every such system: uniq.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)