Listen to this call I got from some outfit called Associated Community Services

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I subscribe to a service called Jolly Roger Telephone Co. It automatically picks up calls from telemarketers and connects them to a bot that speaks with them for as long as the telemarketer is willing to stay on the line with the bot. The purpose of Jolly Roger is to make it costly for telemarketers to ply their sleazy trade by wasting their time. The more time a telemarketer spends talking to a bot, the less time they have talking to potential victims.

When Jolly Roger answers a call and one of its bots talks to a telemarketer, it makes a recording of the call and notifies me about it. Here's a call I got yesterday from "Alice," a professional fundraiser with AC Services. Her smarmy insincerity is so over the top that I thought it was worth sharing. The bot that Jolly Roger connected to Alice is a grumpy old man, and when he says "Hello?" in a suspicious tone, Alice says "Oh, it's so good to hear a nice voice again! My ears have been ringin' ever since my son got his band back together. Hahahahaha!!!"

Alice is either reading from a script, or, more likely, simply pressing buttons that play bits of a pre-recorded script. When interrupted by the bot (which doesn't have any AI beyond being able to detect silence so it can say something random to the telemarketer), Alice presses the button again. She even presses a button that has applause and cheers from the office when she thinks the bot has agreed to donate $20 to a charity called United Breast Cancer Foundation, which has 1 star (out of 4) financial rating on Charity Navigator, and was listed by the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting as America's 38th Worst Charity:

The charity has raised about $11.5 million over the past 10 years and spent more than half of that on professional fundraisers.