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The FTC Will Pay You $25K to Honeydick Some Robocallers

The agency is crowdsourcing solutions for the telephonic spam.

The Federal Trade Commission is just as tired of telemarketers as you are, and it's turning to crowdsourcing for help.

The agency announced a contest on Wednesday encouraging participants to design technology targeting unwanted robocalls and redirecting them to a honeypot, a system that will allow government, private, and academic partners to analyze them.

Most robocalls, the annoying prerecorded messages that try to sell you products, are banned under the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule. People who receive these calls can report them to the FTC's Do Not Call Complaint​ Assistant, but the process is not the most efficient.

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With this contest, called Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back, the FTC hopes to find a better system. It launches its qualifying phase on Wednesday, which runs through June 15, 2015. Five candidates will be selected to move onto the final phase, which will conclude at DEF CO​N 23, a hacking conference in Las Vegas, on August 9, 2015. Submissions be judged by a panel of four experts and the winner will get $25,000. Two runners-up will get $10,500 each and the other two finalists will get $2,000 just for making it to the final rounds.

This is not the first time the FTC has encouraged tech-savvy citizens to help them fight robocalls. The agency launched a similar contest in 2013, which amassed 800 submissions, including two succ​essful ideas. One, called Nomorobo, identifies and hangs up on robocalls before they can get through to consumers, and is on t​he market today. The other winner, submitted by Google, was integrated into pre-existing technology at the company.

The FTC hosted another similar contest in 2​014. The technology that won, a honeypot that identifies robocalls, is available open source for other companies to use, a FTC spokesperson told Motherboard.

"We're using many strategies to fight robocalls, including law enforcement, education, and crowd-sourced innovation," Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection said in a statement. "Following the success of our previous robocall challenges, we're once again seeking expertise from the public to put a new tool in consumers' hands, and to develop technology to help law enforcement and other partners investigate these calls."

If you think your idea to thwart robocalls is worth $25,000, you can take a crack at it by submitting it through​ the FTC's website.