Michael Silveira was fed up. Twice a day last May, he answered his cell phone, only to hear a recording from a company trying to sell him an extended warranty on his car.
Silveira didn’t own a car.
Worse, in America, cell phone owners share the cost of incoming calls. So by answering the phone, Silveira was helping to pay for his own harassment.
He could have sued — it’s illegal for telemarketers to call US cell phone numbers — but instead the 22-year-old laboratory technician decided to get even. Using information posted at Reddit.com, Silveira found phone numbers for Auto One, the company selling the car warranties. He called Auto One and left long voice-mail messages consisting of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” — a British pop song from 1987 that, to American ears, sounds particularly cloying.
Enough other harrassed phone owners joined in the “Rickrolling” that their messages blocked the company’s entire phone system. Some even hacked into it and changed Auto One’s own messages. Someone found the company president’s home phone number and made it a target as well.
Americans are bombarded with advertising like no other people on Earth — but at least the TV and radio can be turned off. For about 20 years, it’s been a running joke — and something I’ve witnessed during numerous visits — that you’ll just be sitting down to dinner when a telemarketer will call you. (Well, that’s when you’re at home!)
Some people try to fight back by feigning interest and getting connected to a human operator, whom they involve in a long, irrelevant conversation in order to waste the company’s time and money. But “robocalls” are very cheap — $2,000 buys 100,000 of them — and some people do buy from the businesses being advertised.
The biggest help came in 2004 with the National Do Not Call Registry, a government list of phone owners who don’t want to receive telephone advertising. The Registry’s exemption of robocalls, however, may have contributed to their increased use.
As of this week, however, hope is in the air, thanks to a new law that makes most robocalls illegal. Only those who have agreed to receive such calls may receive them.
Of course, there’s no rule without an exception. Politicians and survey-takers are still allowed to make such calls. They can be just as bad as the telemarketers, when they call at inconvenient times or spread false or misleading information.
As with so many things, The Simpsons hit the nail on the head. In an episode from 1996, Homer Simpson finds a machine that will automatically dial phone numbers and play a recorded message. He programs the machine to call every number in Springfield, suggesting to those who answer that they send him a dollar.
It is a harmless enough idea, bringing in a bit of spare cash for our hapless hero, until people receive the same call for the fifth or sixth time, even late at night. The citizens of Springfield force Homer to stop the robocalls. He then reprograms the machine to call everyone to apologize. If they can forgive him, the new message says, they should send him a dollar.
I say send over Rick Astley instead. In person.
