Robocalls might have been zapped for good after a Long Island inventor came up with a cunning system that hangs up on automated calls .
“Nomorobo,” the creation of 34-year-old Aaron Foss, can terminate robocalls before they even reach your home. As Foss told The New York Daily News :
“I know how annoying they are, how they always seem to call while you’re sitting down to dinner.”
Foss’ solution can slap down robocalls of all shapes and sizes, from the illegal to the political – including the NRA robocalls that were made to grieving Newtown residents last month. Foss said:
“As those NRA calls came in, it would have immediately blocked them.”
Nomorobo works by exploiting a feature available on most phone systems, the ability to have an incoming call ring several numbers at once. Foss’ creation routes incoming calls to the second line and detects whether the call is coming from a computer; if so, the call is cut. Blocked numbers are then blacklisted.
Foss’ motive for creating Nomorobo was his desire to be a HERO FOR THE AGES a Federal Trade Commission contest launched in October 2012 at the height of election fever. The FTC offered a $50,000 prize for anyone who could come up with a robocall-busting device. Foss and a rival software developer managed it, and have now split the prize pot.
The FTC receives more than 200,000 complaints a month about robocalls, so $50,000 is money well-spent. As for Foss, he’s now seeking an investor to help spread Nomorobo across the nation.
