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The makers of the popular RoboKiller app are taking on robocalls in a hilarious way – fighting back by wasting their time in an effort to save yours.
There are lots of apps out there to help you block robocalls, but only one of them is fighting back.
“RoboKiller doesn’t just block all these calls, it actually answers them with answer bots which are robots of our own that talk back to the spammers and waste their time,” explained Ethan Garr, Vice-President of Product at TelTech Systems, the company behind the app.
Garr spends his days working on clever ways to outsmart the bad guys calling our phones.
“On average, Americans are getting about 19 calls a month and if your lucky one of them is a legal robocall that the Do Not Call list would help you with,” said Garr.
The calls we get on our cell phones and landlines can range from annoying, to confusing and even expensive for victims who fall for them.
“Behind this are people who are ruthless. They want to get to your pocket and they don’t care if they hurt you,” said Garr.
His company’s RoboKiller app – with over 83,000 ratings on the App Store – blocks suspected scam numbers but takes it a step further by silently calling them back. Don’t worry, the calls aren’t placed from your phone but from RoboKiller’s servers.
They’re also recording them so others can relish in the time-wasting agony of robots wasting spammers time.
You can pick from dozens of funny and outrageous answer bots or even make your own.
And, although Garr says the entertainment value isn’t lost on them, the idea behind wasting robocallers time is serious: the more time their human scam artists spend on the phone with bots, the less time they have to scam you.
“We look at it as a financial problem. If we can reach into their pockets and steal money from them then we can win this war,” concluded Garr.
RoboKiller is $3 a month and available on iOS and Android. It does require the use of conditional call forwarding to help screen your calls.
NOW LISTEN to an extended interview with Ethan Garr of the RoboKiller app and hear some hilarious time-wasting calls recorded by their bots in the Rich on Tech Podcast.
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