I was just listening to a radio discussion about dealing with scam phone calls. A lady phoned in and said that she blows a loud whistle when she gets one and the presenter got her to demonstrate. What we heard was a loud(ish) hissing noise. She insisted that it was not a dog whistle but more like the ones used by referees.
The question is - does the scammer hear the same muffled squeak, or are their eardrums assaulted by a shrill noise? It should be easy to test if you have a friend with a suitable whistle.
My understanding is that the audio quality of phone sounds is (still!) so degraded that the scammer won’t hear anything close to what the whistleblower will hear.
I just got 3 calls from random numbers this morning. I used to think the simplest method was to answer and say nothing - usually these are autodialers, which won’'t pass the call to a human (in a call center) or play the scam call (“the IRS has a warrant out for you…”) unless they detect a human saying “Hello?”. A real phone call, someone will say “Hello?” first after the pause if they are calling you.
I concluded this simply told the autodialer try later, the phone does get answered. Ideally, the solution would be to play a fax machine answering, hoping the dialer will cross your number off their list, human will never answer. But - not easy to accomplish, especially with a cellphone.
For now, if it doesn’t have valid caller ID, an actual business name or person I recognize, I won’t answer. Maybe the autodialer will eventaully conclude “phone never answers”.
Well, it’s “degraded” on purpose. Telephones were originally designed for voice transmission. The frequencies present in the human voice range from 30 Hz to 3400 Hz. In order to save bandwidth, and therefore pass more total phone calls on any given transmission medium, higher frequencies are filtered out. Plus, the volume is limited on the far end - so a 110 dB sound on the speaker side will probably get limited down to 70 dB on the listeners side. So yes, a whistle won’t be nearly as annoying to the listener as it is to the speaker.
I would like an app that stays connected on the call and then every time the line goes silent for 2 seconds it says “Please tell me more about this, I’m very interested”, then goes back to listening for another pause.
My point was that many people advocate a whistle or similar as a deterrent to scammers. It looks as if it has little or no effect. Maybe keeping them talking would be more annoying.
As it happens, I don’t get any of these calls as my phone will reject them. Calls from strangers that it doesn’t reject have to identify themselves and I can accept or reject the call.
My Uncle worked for SW Bell, and I was surprised when he told me the bandwidth of a phone call. Something like 5kHz. I imagine a whistle or fog horn would just be mild noise.
I answer the phone, “This is Plant” and hang up if there is no response within three seconds. I’ve had no scam calls, and no “Why the hell did you hang up on me?” second calls.
My wife asked me “How come you get scam calls on your cellphone and I never do?”
I pointed out she got her phone number in the 90’s (back when cellphones were bricks) from the phone company so it’s in the same number block as house and business phones. When I got mine, there were dedicated exchange numbers for the national cellphone companies (Rogers, Telus, etc.) so mine is obviously a cellphone number.
I’m not sure why scammers tend to avoid landline numbers - we’ve rarely gotten a call on ours - but maybe because it’s far more likely to go to an answering machine or an annoyed business who ignores it? (I did once get a call at work that the Canada Revenue Agency had a warrant out for my arrest…)
I also get texts from DHL and Revenue Canada and my bank and such - all scams - and she does not.
Check this out. Jolly Roger has been creating automated ways to fool scammers for a while. Originally it was simple like you describe (wait for a pause and have the computer play a prerecorded statement). He’s now integrating ChatGPT to make the responses more realistic and drag out the calls even longer:
Because human voices are between 30-3000 Hz, so there’s no reason to spend the money to transmit higher frequencies than that. Long distance calls would have been even more expensive.
Check youtube for the “Hello This is Lenny” videos, that app exists, and it’s surprisingly effective at wasting telemarketers’ time. And funny to listen to. I haven’t seen one where it’s a true scam call.
Anyone engaged in these scam calls is using a computer, a headset, and VOIP software. At most it’s outputting 85 decibels, most likely less. Even on pure landline technology without any software limitations on volume, a phone speaker is only designed to get so loud. If it were possible to deafen someone by whistling into a phone you’d think that there would be some documentation of it ever happening anywhere.
If people want to do anything about these criminal phone calls, it’s going to take more than a whistle.
Before the new regulations that forced even small telcos to check the validity of the caller we got tons on our landline. Handled by answering machine, but the Amazon scam people called every ten minutes some day.
My wife and I got our cellphone numbers at the same time, both in my name. Hers is numerically smaller than mine, and she gets lots of spam calls while I get maybe one a week. I think that’s the reason.
When I was at Bell Labs I took a two week course on how telephones work. It is true that limiting the frequencies transmitted does not hurt sound quality significantly, but the reason they did it was to be able to multiplex several calls on one wire. I heard about the whistles years ago, but I agree it won’t work. I don’t say anything when I answer my cell, and if it is a real person (which it was a few minutes ago) they’ll say something.
From the thread title I thought Scammers was going to be the name of a nightclub, and it struck me as pretty crude to get the waitstaff’s attention by blowing a whistle.
FWIW, I’ve noticed that, for me, these calls often come in threes. I won’t get any for weeks, then I’ll get three (all from different numbers) in the space of a couple of hours. I usually just don’t answer, every now and then I’ll answer and end the call immediately.
It was a very common thing in the UK back in the 70s and 80s. Mums had whistles handy to deal with nuisance or prank calls, usually from juveniles with time on their hands.