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Make robocallers pay with this new app
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: March 27, 2020
In 2020, it is statistically likely that half of the phone calls you receive will be robocalls—up from 4 percent or so just three or four years ago. Pretty annoying, eh?
Well, now you and everyone else can fight back with a new app from the folks who developed DoNotPay (https://donotpay.com/), which bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer.”
DoNotPay started off as a small app to fight parking tickets and has been expanding its platform ever since into areas like small claims cases. It also started a program that creates a credit card for signing up for free trials for services like Netflix and Spotify and then automatically declines the charge when the free trial is over. Then I guess you can get another bogus credit card and use another email address to sign up again, ad infinitum. Whatever.
But this new platform, called Robo Revenge, takes the whole thing up a few levels.
It uses the concept of a bogus credit card to try to hit robocallers where it hurts the most—in their pocketbooks.
Robo Revenge starts by automatically adding you to the national “Do Not Call” list (which doesn’t really work all that well-- but read on). It then generates a burner credit card like the Netflix free trial card.
Robocalls come in anonymously from fake or hijacked phone numbers (people often get phone calls from their own numbers). Because they are anonymous, the call recipient can’t tell what company is calling.
After you are on the Do Not Call list, you’ll get robocalls anyway. You then use the burner card to find out who the company actually is. The app then automatically generates a lawsuit against that company under US law that asks for maximum damages.
If it’s an overseas company, the lawsuit won’t go anywhere. But if it is a US company, they get served. It becomes a kind of mass tort.
Company founder Joshua Browder told Motherboard: “Lawyers have already been making millions suing these scammers, but the average person, who doesn’t understand the law (and doesn’t even know who is calling them), is stuck. Our automated process, combined with the fake credit card, gives this power back to the average person.”