Many of the unwanted callers use autodialers. 'Unwanted' covers charities, churches, politicians, etc as well as scammers.

If an autodialer hears a recorded message signal it will hang up and move onto the next call. Alternatively, if you pick up and there is a long pause after you say "hello", that is the handover time from autodialer to person. Just hang up.

Scam information and reporting: https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/

Steve_R wrote:Alternatively, if you pick up and there is a long pause after you say "hello", that is the handover time from autodialer to person. Just hang up.

The ones with the long pause are called 'predictive diallers' and I hate them with a passion. The business case behind predictive diallers is simply that the call centers time is more important than your time. They would literally rather hang up in your ear than have a employee spend 10 seconds listening to ring tone.

Hence, they have software that monitors how fast the staff are handling call sessions and 'predicts' how long it will be before another agent is ready to take a call (and also monitors the average time taken for people to answer). Based on that it will auto-dial customers in advance of someone being ready to take the call on the assumption that by the time you answer an agent will be free.

If they get it wrong then you'll either get a longer than usual silence or (more often) it will just hang up. Some years back (before they clamped down by forcing them to be more conservative in their predictions) the UK telco authority worked out that 30% of all hang-up calls in England were from predictive diallers.

I get hangups from them a bit because I usually answer my phone on the first ring, which is way faster than they expect. Like you I have taken to hanging up if I don't hear live audio when I answer, though this is a little risky because unfortunately some legitimate businesses use predictive diallers also (for example American Express customer service, as I learned).

chrisw wrote: this is a little risky because unfortunately some legitimate businesses use predictive diallers also (for example American Express customer service, as I learned).

You deal direct with Amex? My Amex was issued via Westpac. I would hang up on someone who introduced themselves as calling for Amex no matter what they said. I would only be very suspicious about someone who said they were from Westpac.

Dialers are mechanised rudeness (I guess that means they piss me off). If a business uses a dialer, as far as I am concerned they can keep getting nothing until a person intervenes and does the calling. Unfortunately, it seems resistance is futile. Robotised telephone operators are well and truly on the skids. We''l all soon be driven to distraction by robots that don't understand the way we phrase things
https://www.replacedbyrobot.info/66117/ ... e-operator

Brian Taylor saying 'orazio fantasia'. God that got old fast.

Galey wrote:Sensis!! It's not the internet that's making you irrelevant, it's your crap service combined with your outrageous pricing.

As of 11:00am today this is still relevant.