Get ready for vam, or voice spam
So we officially got our first piece of "vam", or voice spam, the other day when Vonage, the broadband Voice over IP phone service we use here at Engadget HQ, dropped a promotional message into our voicemail box trying to convince us to upgrade our account. Not a big deal, right? The thing is, Vonage never called us. Because they use Voice over IP they were able to insert the message directly into our inbox, where it was waiting for us next time we checked our voicemail. It's just as easy for them to put a voicemail in everyone's inbox as it is to put into one person's, which is exactly why we have to deal with so much email spam. There are plenty of reasons why the phone system should switch over to Voice over IP, but at least with regular telemarketers even the canned calls had to be made one at a time, something which sorta slowed them down. When you have a system that more or less reduces the cost to sending voice messages down to zero, does anyone really doubt that it'll be abused by sleazebag spammers and telemarketers?
