Trying SIT Tones for Phone Spam

Having recently commented (whined?) about the huge about of email spam clogging the internet, I now turn to the same issue with POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). At our house, we use caller ID and answering machine call screening to deal with most solicitors. This has been remarkably effective. With the election growing near, the politicos are spending a ton of money on these robot autodialers (robocall) that call and leave a recorded message. Although I don’t have to listen to these idiotic messages, they do fill up the answering machine.

Before you tell me to register with the United States Do Not Call Registry, don’t bother. We are registered but it doesn’t apply to political organizations. (Seems that Congress thinks there is some special Freedom of Speech issue here.)

Here is an idea that I have tried and it seems to help. The telephone system has a number of special signaling tones that indicate the status of a phone line, called Special Information Tones. These tones basically tell the calling device that the dialed number has a problem. I recorded these tones at the beginning of our outgoing voice message, followed by my usual “Sorry we can’t take your call right now” greeting. The idea is that a machine calling will hear the tones and give up, while a human will ignore them and listen to the message.

Click here for the sit-tone

I’ve had this running for a few days, and the success rate appears to be about 80%. I still see incoming political calls on the Caller ID but most don’t make it to the answering machine. A few still get through…probably because the calling device ignores the SIT tone.

This is Bob K0NR and I approve this message.

73, Bob K0NR