In Canada, we have a national Do Not Call List. Originally the concept sounded like a great idea to not only prevent solicitors from calling your house trying to sell you junk.

At the time of entering your number into the database you felt secure and free from the harassing phone calls on a nightly basis. It's understandable that consumers do not want people calling their house after a hard days of work trying to sell you junk.

The government would run and operate this national "Do Not Call" list by forcing companies to purchase and cross reference what numbers they are calling. If the company had accidentally called a number on the list, they could be reported and fined for doing so. All sounds great, right? Well, not so much.

What people failed to see, is this "Do Not Call" list is actually a giant database of all the active numbers of private residences. The old days of telemarketers calling 'leads' or flipping through the YellowPages seemed to be over, as Canada is now providing telemarketer scammers with a list of active, private numbers.

So this now leads to where I get involved.

For a number of weeks now our household has been receiving phone calls from people trying to sell us duct cleaning, Viagra and other things. If the junk emails aren't annoying enough, now you have someone on the other line trying to sell you products.

After a number of warnings, asking each caller if they comply with the national do not call list and asking politely to never call again, that didn't seem to work. That was until I finally cracked and began answering phone calls with the intent that they never call here again, my way.

Rather than yelling into the phone telling them "DON'T F-ING CALL HERE AGAIN", I began to do what i've learned over the years from the Internet. Troll them.

There's a number of ways to troll these telemarketers and scare them enough that they feel like you're going to risk blowing their business cover and take you off their call list themselves.

A new method I have come up with:
Ask them for all their personal details. Surprisingly, telemarketers hate this the most. Asking them for company details like address, telephone number, name of the operator all seem to scare these illegitimate scammers away.

I just had an experience where someone from "Delta Duct Cleaning" kept calling. I requested the guys name, who was very reluctant on giving it up, finally gave it to me. His name was 'Davidson', obviously fake, I continued. I requested the address of his company, although he ignored me the first time and went into his script reading, i interrupted him and requested the company address. He questioned me 'Why?', and I told him it's the law and you need to surrender the location of your business. He sputtered something out '16858 Blackmary railroad, Toronto'.

A Google search later revealed there isn't a street called "Blackmary".

So I continued and asked for the company phone number. 'Davidson' said "F*** off, man". I laughed into the phone and he hung up. Only to call back seconds later. I answered and asked "You back for more?" and 'Davidson' hung up once again.

What I failed to notice when I answered the phone was the fake number he was calling from. The number read "1-050-012-3364", but the call display disguise the number as "90500123364 (905-0012-3364), one digit too long. An area code of 9, trying to disguise the number as a local phone number. Clever bugger. The area code "9" is apparently in Central, South and Western Asia

That's just one of the ways I messed with a telemarketer today. Now to sit and wait to see if he ever calls back.