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Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.
"At first, I thought I was crazy," said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. "When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems."
Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.
Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.
But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers' voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother's nursing home or a child's school.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Interesting) by richtopia on Monday June 05 2017, @03:31PM (3 children)
In case you were confused about how it works, the article is sparse in details but it appears to be a special feature of modern voice mail systems. I am not too voice mail savvy, so I thought that voice mail was just a digital answering machine that would pick up after x number of rings.
When I search how to leave a ringless voicemail, I do not find any technical details but advertisements for paid services to enable leaving a ringless voicemail. Does anyone know if this "feature" is available to the layperson or only specific commercial entities can perform ringless voicemails?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+leave+ringless+voicemail&ia=web [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:35PM
This isn't exactly new. About 8 years ago when I was with Sprint (*shudder*) I found out that through their voicemail system I was able to record a new message and then specify which number to send that voicemail to.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 05 2017, @06:16PM
I thought I had heard a rumor a handful of years back that you could hold pound or star when it started ringing to bypass to voicemail, but never tried it.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 05 2017, @08:08PM
Your post got me to doing a little research. Whats disappointing is every hit is some snake oil advertising company looking to sell you a great new way to develop leads! Plus a lot of them are work at home scams. Something to do with "ringless voicemail drops".
So that leaves me with almost no technical detail. I then searched for "ringless voicemail drops tmobile" and I stumbled on this post: http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=34874 [vicidial.org]. The way it is explained by someone is the call center tries to call your phone with two different numbers at the same exact time. This causes both lines to see a busy signal and one line grabs the voicemail. apparently that is illegal according to the FCC, the ringless purveyors claim it is legal. But take this with a grain of salt as no one has an answer.