Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

There's a really good chance they're using a bogus phone number as their caller ID. Even if it isn't, it probably just goes to an automated menu that isn't going to give a poo poo about a phone call that spits machine-generated voice data at them and then hangs up.


Voicemail actually isn't that ambiguous. If an autodialer hits a voicemail, it's going to be recognized and recorded as such, and they're very likely going to try the number again at some point.

When you get a telemarketing call, if there's a weird delay between saying "hello? ...hello?" and a person responding, that's because a computer on the other end is trying to decide whether or not you're a real person in order to either just hang up or to connect you to one of their agents (or they dialed too aggressively and it's waiting for an agent to be freed up to connect to you).

Your best bet at automatically wasting telemarketers' time would be to try and craft a voicemail greeting that sounds like you've just answered the phone, and even then it's only going to be on the order of a few seconds.