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#8452 Captcha for telephones

Since the telemarketing industry has economized and largely replaced human telemarketers with machines, we can cash in on this and create the phone captcha. A captcha is that thing on web pages with scrambly looking letters and numbers that you have to type in to prove you're a human and not some computer program. Similarly the phone message would start like this: "This number does not accept calls from telemarketers. If you are a telemarketer, please hang up now and remove this number from your call list. If not, please dial the following numbers: three, nine, fifty-one." The person then dials the numbers to get through. The machine keeps a white list of phone numbers that have been cleared so a caller only has to pass the test once (unless their number is anonymous).

The dial challenge could of course be made more advanced if it seemed like there was a threat of a counter-system with voice recognition: "please enter the quarter circumference value of a train leaving boston at fifty miles an hour..."

Yes I realize there is a do-not-call list. I also realize that it doesn't work (at least for my mom).
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