“Desperate diseases need desperate remedies”, and we came up with the most Mexican solution we could find: give the telemarketing companies a “Taste of their own medicine”.

We created a system that allows every Mexican to have their own answering machine, which filters telemarketing calls and sends them to an automated recording, in which the person on the other end of the line has to go through a tortuous process, such as they do all too often to Mexicans.

We developed an app that connects to the phone calls system. The user must record a greeting with its name and indicate those phone numbers of unwanted calls, and the app will automatically filter them. Then the next entering call from a filtered number is received is transferred to a recording that says " Hello, you're talking to cellular << name recorded by the user >> If what you want to sell me is a new insurance, press one. If you want to sell me a credit card, press 2 ... " and so on. When the person on the other end of the line press any number, is transferred again to another recording that says "For the moment I cannot take your call" and is switched back to the first recorded message.

After the testing phase, the app will be officially launched in April 2016.

More than 380,000 Mexicans have complained about unwished calls from telemarketing, insurance and banking calls. Many of them would like to give the telemarketing companies a lesson so they would stop bothering people, but it is very difficult to contact these companies, even more to stop them; and to register in the public program to be unsubscribed, most of the time is useless.

It appeared that the solution must reside on the same phone, i.e. an app. In Mexico during 2015 there were 66.9 million users of mobile apps, this is nearly 20 million more than in 2014.

We decided to create a simple app, that every Mexican would be willing to use, just to give a lesson to telemarketing companies and no longer being disturbed.

In Mexico it is very common to receive unwanted calls from telemarketing and insurance companies, or banks to sell products and services calls. When a person answers one of those calls, there is always someone trying to sell whether, a new insurance, phone plan or credit card with such a speech that almost sounds robotized. And Mexicans are sick of it. This situation is so “mind-boggling” that, there is even a government office that created a public register in which citizens can unsubscribe of databases, though not very useful since many telemarketing operators change their social reason to avoid these restrictions.

As good Mexicans, we had to find a very Mexican solution. Our goal was to end with this exasperating issue, and prove we can always be more Mexicans.