The company that's fighting back against robo calls in a hilarious way. What's going on. I'm rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech with me today is Ethan gar He runs a company called Robokiller, which has an app that can help you avoid robo calls on your cell phone. But even better, they will actually fight back against these robo calls with something called answer bots. Ethan, Welcome to the podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me.
So tell me about Robokiller. Tell me about the app. How is it different than other apps out there?
Yeah, so robokiller will block millions of these unwanted, annoying telemarketing and scam calls from reaching your phone. But what's really awesome about it is not only will it do that, but in the background, it'll answer those calls with these answer bots, which are robots of our own that are really smart. They know how to press one to find the humans behind these calls so they can waste their time.
There are recordings of our own that will have conversations with these guys and talk to them sometimes hours on end, just wasting their time, which is time that they can't spend reaching into your pocket stealing money from you. Stealing your identity.
It's quite hilarious because inside the app, you let users see the phone calls that they're getting and the responses you made to those with your answer bots, and it's all recorded, and you can literally go in and kind of normally you'd want to avoid anything to do with robo calls, but you're kind of making this fun to see that you're wasting their time.
Yeah, I mean, we definitely want to start with this idea that you're we're going to give you that peace and quiet, right when when your phone doesn't ring, you feel good, Right, that's the problem you're trying to solve. When you have robo Killer, we block these calls from
ringing on your phone. The only thing you're going to get is a notification that says, hey, we've blocked this call, but silently and in the background, we're answering this call, and we're recording the conversation between the answer bot and the telemarketer. Then once that call is done, this recording is in the app available for you to go listen to.
So you can go listen to this robot, which you may have even created, because we let you create your own answer bots or choose from one that we've created. You can then go and listen to that conversation and hilarious when you hear you know, one of our answer bots is a guy who's in a canoe that's sinking and he's you know, when you hear the telemarketer trying to, you know, sell this guy on something and he's like, hey, what do you do about a shark, you know, swimming
around you. You know, it gets really funny and it's amazing how entertaining it can be. But you know, it's great to to you know, be able to solve a problem and do it in a fun way.
The app. A lot of people are hesitant to download these apps for two reasons. Number one, they cost money. Generally, if you're getting a good service, you're probably gonna have to pay for it, right, so you're like three bucks a month. The second thing is if I sign up, am I handing over my phone number and just accepting a million calls from these robo callers.
No, we're definitely in the business of stopping these robo calls, not making more come to your phone. There is a fee, but we give you a seven day free trial. We want people to feel comfortable before they choose their monthly or yearly plan. We want people to know that this is a service that they're going to get value out of,
and we're confident they will. And I think the first time you get that notification that we've blocked a call and then you go and listen to it, there's that moment, that aha moment where you go, oh wow, this is finally a real solution to this problem.
All right, let's go over some of the most common scam calls coming in. Number one, Rachel from Cardholder Services. I feel like I've gotten this one because the best part about this is that everyone has a credit card. So when they call you, they're like, this is call from your credit card. You're like, oh, I need to listen to this.
Yeah. The first thing she says is that there's no problem with your account, and you're like, well, why are you calling me then? But yeah, this is a really old one. In fact, I think I was telling you earlier. Rachel from Cardholder Services got replaced with like Heather from Cardholder Services and Kristen from Cardholder Services and a whole other slew of women from Cardholder Services for a while, but Rachel has made her way back and is again
one of the most popular scams. And I believe it's a debt consolidation scam where they're trying to get you to combine credit cards. But it's you know, it's a relentless one. It's millions and millions of calls. In fact, it's probably a significant percentage of the five billion robocalls and telemarketing calls that are being made every month.
Two Americans, All Right, a carpet cleaning company. What's the deal on that?
Yeah, that was a carpet cleaning referral service. We see, we see it to this day from what I understand, Uh, there's a chance that a carpet cleaner will actually show up at your door if you contract through these services. But the calls they're making are legal.
So it's sort of a referral service. But the way they're doing it is so it's a legit business really because they're probably giving leads to businesses.
It's probably not a like a legal registered business, but it is. But the what they what they're not trying to do as far as I know, is get you to give them money and then have nothing happen at the you know, it's but it's still it's still a scam. They're not. You can go contract these services by opening up the phone book or looking online and finding your you know, much more reputable service.
The phone book. What's that I use y'all money than you know about y'all? All right, Investigation team of IRS. This is a scary one because it's the government calling you and you'll listen.
Yeah, and people to this day fall for it, even though this you know, it's it's now been going on at least five or six years, if not more, and the FTC and the FCC and the i r S have put out public service announcements trying to get people to make sure that they don't fall for this scam. Because the I r S will not call you about a debt, a debt like this, it's not how they do their enforcement. But what's really crazy about that call is usually the end of that call is them telling
you you have to call a phone number. And if you think about it, the people who call that phone number are self selecting themselves as victims. They are saying, I believe that this this robot that called me, that told me that if I don't call them back, is actually going to send the police to arrest me within the hour if I don't call these people back. So it's one that's I think it's one of the most
horrific ones because it's really based on fear. It targets the most vulnerable in society, and at the end of the day, it steals millions and millions of dollars.
Health Insurance Enrollment Center, health insurance hot topic.
Yeah, there's actually a number of health insurance scams. It's no matter what area code I look at, it's health insurance is almost always in the top five as one of the scams. They are targeting people, especially the elderly or people who have trouble getting health insurance. A lot of younger people are having trouble getting health insurance. They're targeting them with these calls because again, they look at people these as as you know, they look for vulnerable markets.
This is a big one. I get a lot of emails and calls about the tech support scams out there, and the Microsoft Security Department is just one name that this goes under. There's probably many others.
Right, but I assume when you answer that, you're like, you know, I'm a tech reporter, right.
I actually got one of these people on the phone, and I wanted to see what they did. So I went through the whole flow and I saw how they said go to this IP address. I was like, oh, because I wanted to know what they were making people. Do ya download some software to your computer that lets them remotely take access? Yep? And it was very slick, I must say. How they did it?
Yeah, they you know, they really have become experts in playing this mind game to get you to go that one next step, you know, and if you do this, everything's going to be okay. If you do this, everything's going to be okay. And your computer, which was working fine before you got this call, all of a sudden is locked up.
You know.
They've put some ransomware and you can't get you know, and they're saying, hey, I can fix this for you. You just have to, you know, go to Target and get me a five hundred dollars gift card or something crazy, you know, like they the payment schemes are always strange, you know, whether it's with bitcoin or something like this.
But uh yeah, but yeah, we'll do it. Because I just got an email from someone who said her mom bought I think it was like eight thousand dollars in iTunes gift cards, and they stayed with them on the phone to go from store to store because you can't clearly buy all those at one store. I just couldn't even believe that that was real.
And I've heard of the irs scam ending with that, with you know, someone driving around getting these, you know, buying these gift cards, and you'd think someone, you'd think someone would say to themselves, the government would not make me go to target, right, or you like drive around like this.
Okay, So let's listen to one of these answer bots because they are just hilarious. Here's an answer bot calling back a robocaller on the Robokiller app.
Hey, Abby, here's the deal.
You just call me in a vocal training exercise mode. Just hear me like think for like thirty seconds and e then that long before.
Your legend never did.
At But yeah, can you just like give me your honest opinion about what you thought of that?
Dude?
Oh no, oh my god, are you watching the television right now? Do you see what's happening?
No, what's going on?
Oh my god, you got to turn on the news.
This is awful.
No, Oh god, I can't even watch this. Oh no, no, what the hell's going on? You got to turn on the news or something. It must be all over the internet. Oh my god, what is it?
Tell me? You're freaking me out, man. These answer bots are hilarious. So you've made it fun to interact with these guys. What does this do? What does it prove when you call these guys? I mean, it seems like you're wasting your time, But is there actually a benefit of these answer bots?
Well?
Yeah, absolutely. Answer bots are designed to waste scammers time, and time is money, if you think about it, whether we like it or not, whether they're legitimate, meaning they registered or not. These are businesses. They look at this, you know, they look at this from a dollars and cents perspective. They have costs, which are making these calls labor, and they have revenue that's the scam money that they
bring in. They will do anything to increase their bottom line, but at the end of the day, time is the one thing that's their most precious commodity they've got. You know, they can make millions and millions of robocalls, but they're limited by the number of humans who can actually go and then fit and finish the scam.
You know, close to the people forget about this aspect because we call them robo calls. We assume they're just all robotic and automated, But there is a portion of the call where push comes to shove and you have to talk to a real person to kind of complete that transaction.
Yeah, I've never heard of a of a scam call where it doesn't end with you talking to a human being. Oh, it starts with a robocall, because that's the you know, that's the top of the funnel. They can make gazillions of calls very cheap, and you know, they just have to have someone available to answer when when the group. Then when a smaller group of of the people who got the call, press one or call them back that
small group. And in some cases, you know, I've seen an IRS phone scam where I kept calling them back and calling them back, and I realized that it was two people. It was two people. They were they weren't in the same room, but they were. They were. It was two eyes who were making these calls. And I realized all I had to do was keep calling them back and wasting their time and I could drive them crazy at the end of the day, whether it's two people or two hundred people in a bullpen, answer bots
have that same effect. Answer bots can talk to two hundred people at a time, and that's two hundred people who can't be talking to somebody's elderly grandmother or anybody else. Yes, it's hilarious, Yes it's fun, but we ultimately believe that this is impacting their bottom line and we hear it at the end of the day. We're having a huge impact on this. You know, we're disrupting this illegal marketplace
because our answer bots are really impacting their time. Sixty thousand hours of time last month that we wasted of spammers. That was sixty thousand hours that they didn't have to reach into your pocket and rob you.
Ethan Gar, thanks so much for joining me. The app again is called Robokiller. It's available for iOS and Android. Check it out seven day free trial. After that you can pay a little monthly fee to have all of your calls blocked but or all of your robo calls blocked, but more importantly, be entertained this thing. They even have an answer bot radio where you can just tune in and listen to some of these other calls that they're recording. It is crazy, Ethan, thanks so much for joining me.
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. All right.
If you want to link to Robokiller, you can go to my website. It's rich on tech dot tv, or just check the show notes. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Rich Uniro. I'll talk to you real soon.