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The TeleZapper is a device designed to reduce the number of telemarketing-related phone calls a household receives by imitating the tone signal normally played by a phone company to indicate a line has been disconnected. The Telezapper was created by Privacy Technologies, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Appliance Mfg. Co.
Telemarketing companies typically use predictive dialers to place many calls simultaneously. When the equipment detects that someone has answered one of the many calls it has made, it quickly transfers that call to an available agent. Unanswered calls, or numbers that are disconnected, are not transferred to agents and the call is terminated automatically.
In this way, the agent is spared the time of dialing a call and waiting for an answer, and can simply speak to waiting calls that have been already set up. Additionally, if a number is determined to be disconnected, the equipment will usually mark that number as such and will not dial it again or as often.
The TeleZapper is an appliance that plugs into a consumer telephone line. On detecting a ring and answer of any phone on the line, the Telezapper will immediately play a sequence of Special information tones or "SIT": one of eight internationally standardized signals that indicate a call cannot be completed. Typically the "Intercept" or "IC" SIT is used, indicating the number called has been disconnected or changed.
By playing this tone signal on the line, a predictive dialer calling the household would hear it, assume the number was disconnected, terminate the call and likely mark the number as "disconnected" in its database.
This "tricking" of the telemarketer's equipment was effectively highlighted in marketing material for the TeleZapper as a way to get revenge on the "obnoxious telemarketers". The device is powered by a CR2032 battery, which is not documented in the manual and is replaced by opening the unit.
A predictive dialer merely checks for three conditions:
Some telemarketing firms have turned off the SIT tone detector altogether in response to the TeleZapper trick, rendering it wholly ineffective.
Another limitation is that the device does not work well with voice mail systems. This is because voice mail reroutes the call from a physical line to the voice mail service without the phone ever picking up.
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into electronic signals that are transmitted via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which reproduces the sound to the receiving user. The term is derived from Greek: τῆλε and φωνή, together meaning distant voice. A common short form of the term is phone, which came into use almost immediately after the first patent was issued.
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call. Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing.
Caller identification is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call is being set up. The caller ID service may include the transmission of a name associated with the calling telephone number, in a service called Calling Name Presentation (CNAM). The service was first defined in 1993 in International Telecommunication Union—Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation Q.731.3.
A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. This allowed the user, referred to as a "phreaker", to surreptitiously place long-distance calls that would be billed to another number or dismissed entirely as an incomplete call. A number of similar "color boxes" were also created to control other aspects of the phone network.
An answering machine, answerphone or message machine, also known as telephone messaging machine in the UK and some Commonwealth countries, ansaphone or ansafone, or telephone answering device (TAD), is used for answering telephones and recording callers' messages. If a phone rings a number of times predetermined by the phone's owner, and nobody is present to answer the incoming call, the answering machine will activate and play either a generic announcement or the voice of the person being called announcing that nobody is able to come to the phone at the moment. Following the announcement is a beeping tone which prompts the caller to record a message after the tone concludes.
The National Do Not Call Registry is a database maintained by the United States federal government, listing the telephone numbers of individuals and families who have requested that telemarketers not contact them. Certain callers are required by federal law to respect this request. Separate laws and regulations apply to robocalls in the United States.
A predictive dialer dials a list of telephone numbers and connects answered dials to people making calls, often referred to as agents. Predictive dialers use statistical algorithms to minimize the time that agents spend waiting between conversations, while minimizing the occurrence of someone answering when no agent is available.
A dialer or dialler is an electronic device that is connected to a telephone line to monitor the dialed numbers and alter them to seamlessly provide services that otherwise require lengthy National or International access codes to be dialed. A dialer automatically inserts and modifies the numbers depending on the time of day, country or area code dialed, allowing the user to subscribe to the service providers who offer the best rates. For example, a dialer could be programmed to use one service provider for international calls and another for cellular calls. This process is known as prefix insertion or least cost routing. A line powered dialer does not need any external power but instead takes the power it needs from the telephone line.
A telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the called party and the calling party.
Call waiting is a telephone service where a subscriber can accept a second incoming telephone call by placing an in-progress call on hold—and may also switch between calls. With some providers it can be combined with additional features such as conferencing, call forwarding, and caller ID. Call waiting is intended to alleviate the need to have more than one telephone line or number for voice communications.
Phone fraud, or more generally communications fraud, is the use of telecommunications products or services with the intention of illegally acquiring money from, or failing to pay, a telecommunication company or its customers.
On analog telephone lines with special services, a flash or register-recall signal is used to control functions on the public telephone exchange, PBX or VoIP ATA.
A silent call is a telephone call in which the calling party does not speak when the call is answered. Most such calls are generated by a cold call telemarketing operation's predictive dialer which makes many calls, and sometimes does not have an agent immediately available to handle an answered call; the called party hears silence, followed by the call being disconnected. This differs from a ghost call, which is not dialed intentionally, and is due to technical issues or pocket dialing.
In telephony, a special information tone (SIT) is an in-band international standard call progress tone consisting of three rising tones indicating a call has failed. It usually precedes a recorded announcement describing the problem.
Voice broadcasting is a mass communication technique, begun in the 1990s, that broadcasts telephone messages to hundreds or thousands of call recipients at once. This technology has both commercial and community applications. Voice broadcast users can contact targets almost immediately. When used by government authorities, it may be known as an emergency notification system.
In telecommunication, supervision is the monitoring of a telecommunication circuit for telephony to convey to an operator, user, or a switching system, information about the operational state of the circuit. The typical operational states of trunks and lines are the idle and busy states, seizure, and disconnect. The states are indicated by various electrical signals and electrical conditions depending on the type of circuit, the type of terminating equipment, and the type of intended service.
Telemarketing fraud is fraudulent selling conducted over the telephone. The term is also used for telephone fraud not involving selling.
An automatic dialer is an electronic device or software that automatically dials telephone numbers. Once the call has been answered, the autodialer either plays a recorded message or connects the call to a live person.
