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Two years spent spamming spammers back

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Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#121

Post by mkagenius »

kalleboo wrote: post #23

This is a great idea. Waste the spammer's time and it's no longer worth it. The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem). There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to, and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.…

If you want a youtube clip to talk back to the spammer use : https://dubdial.com

disclosure: I am one of the author

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#122

Post by [deleted] »

kalleboo wrote: post #23

This is a great idea. Waste the spammer's time and it's no longer worth it. The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem). There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to, and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.…

[deleted]

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#123

Post by imgabe »

grecy wrote: post #27

> Imagine if this type of thing happened in real-life. You walk out the door in the morning and you’re immediately attacked by Parul, Kevin, and Amelie. I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in West Africa. Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if it's because I'm Wh…

I had a similar experience in China and found it very helpful that a friend told me how to say "I don't want it" in Mandarin (Bu yao). Vendors will ignore your polite "No thank yous" in English, but they went away much faster after speaking their own language.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#125

Post by tempestn »

maaaats wrote: post #85
titomc wrote: post #80

One spammer realised that he is talking to a bot and asks the bot about the three laws. http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/3072

This kinda rocked my view on spammers. It's easy to group them together and have a lot of prejudice, but clearly they come in all kinds of forms.

I would say that this sort of service spam is generally on a different tier from your classic 419 garbage or whatever. Usually those outfits will have their most competent person dealing with email to rope in new customers.

Amusing aside: I once hired one of these Indian web dev outsourcing firms to create a super simple form for one of our sites. (Not from a spam email, which I certainly wouldn't want to reward, but probably a similar outfit.) We could have done it in house, but I wanted to see how viable it would be to farm out simple, nicely encapsulated work when it came up.

Their failures were many and varied, but the most hilarious was when one of them wanted to givea section of form an orange border. (For some reason. The site's colour scheme was mostly greens with no orange to be seen.) Anyway, he decided the best way to do this was to find an enormous png of a sunset (multiple megabytes), and repeat a small strip of the top 10px or so as a background image in a div behind the area. I'm still not sure whether I was being trolled, or if incompetence on that scale is actually possible. (Normally I would assume it must be the former, but given their myriad other screw-ups, I'm not entirely sure.)

Every time I would write to complain about something utterly idiotic they'd done, they would wholeheartedly agree, share in my amazement at how foolish it was, and assure me that that junior programmer had been removed, and someone more senior would be taking over the project. (I went through a couple of levels of seniority, then eventually gave up when the Senior Lead Architect or whoever delivered the orange border monstrosity.)

Anyway, the most competent person in that company was definitely the one sending the emails.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#126

Post by kalleboo »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #103
wofo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably check Lenny out: https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

That's great, is there an app that will do this, like put it down next to your landline phone and let it answer for you?

If you look at the reddit sidebar there's a phone number you can forward to or conference in

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#127

Post by rhizome »

paulddraper wrote: post #118
rhizome wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time: sneeze on their hands.

Assault with a deadly weapon, depending on your germs.

Somebody sticks their hands in my face just as I'm about to sneeze, you're gonna have a hard time proving that one, assuming anything projected from a sneeze could possibly constitute a deadly weapon. A ham sandwich would be too large, and an unrealistic example.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#128

Post by craigsmansion »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #106
craigsmansion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother with that if you feel perfectly self-entitled, judging by the comments, to be aggressive and yell crude language at people who are just trying to make a living in a manner or cultural context you don't understand or want to have anything to do with?

I like where your thoughts are coming from. I also have a solid guess you've never experienced this enviroment. Imagine being swamped by a group of people that physically get in your way, shifting to stay in-front of you when you try and go around. You simply can't progress from people trying to get you to buy goods you really have no interest in. Your stuck for minutes at a time multiple times a block. Now imagine t…

> I also have a solid guess you've never experienced this environment.

Maybe there are worse environments that I have never experienced and where outright rudeness is the only answer, but as described I have experienced it and never had to resort to anything more than:

- keep moving at a firm pace

- avoid eye contact

- hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here)

- as a last resort, speak loudly and sternly in a local language without addressing anyone directly, "No, thank you," or "No!"

It's still rude, but I feel a far cry from defaulting to yelling obscenities and getting agitated.

As I said, maybe there are environments where that doesn't work, or maybe it just works for me. But defaulting to rudeness without even attempting to figure out the appropriate measure of sternness in a place where you are, for most intents and purposes, a guest, is poor form.

Yes, it is annoying, but nevertheless, you are in their country, and they are trying to make an honest (not counting the overpricing of their goods) living. If someone can't handle that, maybe they shouldn't have gone there.

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#129

Post by Dayshine »

craigsmansion wrote: post #128
Gustomaximus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like where your thoughts are coming from. I also have a solid guess you've never experienced this enviroment. Imagine being swamped by a group of people that physically get in your way, shifting to stay in-front of you when you try and go around. You simply can't progress from people trying to get you to buy goods you really have no interest in. Your stuck for minutes at a time multiple times a block. Now imagine t…

> I also have a solid guess you've never experienced this environment. Maybe there are worse environments that I have never experienced and where outright rudeness is the only answer, but as described I have experienced it and never had to resort to anything more than: - keep moving at a firm pace - avoid eye contact - hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here) - as a las…

>- keep moving at a firm pace

>- hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here)

What, push people out of the way?

And now that you've touched someone, they'll touch back...

Re: Two years spent spamming spammers back

#130

Post by norea-armozel »

jacalata wrote: post #94
halomru wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>sales cold calls, though... you know people are going to do it. It is their job. Sales cold calls are illegal in my country and happen to me once every few years. My email address isn't so lucky. >Sure, junk mail is annoying and most of it gets thrown out. And more importantly: I can put a simple "no advertisements" sign on my real mailbox and cut down junk to almost zero. I wish I could do that to my virtual inbox.…

> I can put a simple "no advertisements" sign on my real mailbox and cut down junk to almost zero. Fun fact: this isn't possible in the US. I'd never considered how that might influence how Americans think about spam email in general.

It's a weird thing tbh when most of my mail is literally just advertisements for services around my area. Some of it is interesting but most don't apply to me (ex. Had several mailers for private schooling since there's a couple schools like that in the neighborhood) so I have to wonder how successful is junk mail like that in producing a profitable result. I have to imagine the cost would have to be very low to justify the constant stream of junk mail I receive.
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