Spoofing Telemarketers' Robots is Easy!

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I stopped telemarketers from robo-dialing my phones at home and at the office. This trick has no effect on manually-dialed calls. With the elections spinning up into high rev, this may even keep Donald Trump from calling!

First, I linked to this webpage: http://privatecitizen.com/audio/sit-tone.wav

Second, I recorded the tones generated by the webpage into my voicemail greeting on each of my phone lines, and immediately followed the tones with the usual "We're not home right now, so leave a message after the beep" greeting.

Finally, I left the voicemail systems running 24/7 for a week, and screened my calls manually using Caller ID.

I had 12 robocalls on one phone line the day before setting this up. The day after, I had only 2. I had only 1 robocall per day for the next three days on that phone line.

In the last ten days, I've 0 robocalls on any of my phones!

Sure, and I've read claims that telemarketers have proprietary methods for defeating this scheme; but none of them seem to be profitable enough to be in general use. Maybe they've finally decided that if a person will go to this much effort to avoid them, then such a person is not worth calling in the first place.

You aren't spoofing the telemarketer's robots. To spoof something means to imitate it, often in a satirical manner. Your method imitates the phone company's not-in-service tone.

That's the dictionary definition. Colloquially, "Spoofing" means to fool or trick someone.

Have you tried the method I described?

Or do you want to debate semantics?