Proposed solution for the FTC's latest contest.

So the FTC is now offering a reward to the person offering a way to stop telemarketing or robot calls. This may prove to be a bit difficult, but it can be done and I wish I had the funds to work on this. Since I don't though, here is what I'm thinking.

What they would need is not to monitor the content of calls, but the pattern that calls are made. If calls are made in a timed pattern of more than three or four in a row, then we take that number and block all outgoing calls until they can answer a simple spoken word or a math problem over the phone to restore service. This would resemble a system close to the one we use for social networking or chat systems that use a Captcha model to deter bots.

The only way a telemarketing robot could get around this would be to use a new outgoing number after making the max amount of calls per number. Using a triangulation or location based system to detect location, would also help this from happening, because if two or more numbers are found from the same location repeating the same call patterns, it's a bot.

It's a good start at least, and its a solution based on software and not hardware, so there is no need to upgrade existing equipment in order for it to work.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, Thanks.