FTC Moves Against Robocalls, Award $50,000 to Promising Solutions to Unwanted Telemarketing

The Federal Trade Commission has long sought ways to prevent robocalls -- automated, unsolicited telemarketing calls that often contain dubious or outright fake offers -- the telephone equivalent of spam emails.

Despite regulations restricting the calls, as well as lengthy and mostly ineffective "Do Not Call" lists, telemarketers and their messages continue to proliferate, so the FTC has turned to technology.

Enter the "Robocall Challenge," a contest with a $50,000 prize for the best anti-robocall tech.

And the prize is being split by two winners.

"The winners, who split a $50,000 prize, are Aaron Foss, a software developer from Long Island, and Serdar Danis, a computer engineer who declined to reveal his hometown," the New York Times writes. "Mr. Foss conceived Nomorobo, a way to use a phone system's talents against itself to build a blacklist of threatening numbers. Mr. Danis came up with the less creatively named Robocall Filtering System and Device with Autonomous Blacklisting, Whitelisting, Graylisting and Caller ID Spoof Detection."

Both methods are just proposals and will need to be fully developed before they can be implemented, steps that should be easier with the prize money, which Foss and Danis will split.

"Danis's proposal would analyze and block robocalls using software that could be implemented as a mobile app, an electronic device in a user's home, or a feature of a provider's telephone service," the FTC said in a press release. "Foss's proposal is a cloud-based solution that would use 'simultaneous ringing,' which allows incoming calls to be routed to a second telephone line. This second line would identify and hang up on illegal robocalls before they could ring through to the user."

Two Google employees won in a non-monetary category. Daniel Klein and Dean Jackson's Crowd-Sourced Call Identification and Suppression uses algorithms (go figure) to identify spam callers.

If any of these solutions pan out, perhaps we'll all be able to enjoy dinner in piece, separately browsing our smartphones at the table without being interrupted by Unknown Caller.