Warranty Robo-Callers Get Rickrolled

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - A 22-year-old fed up with automated phone calls about his nonexistent car's warranty looked to the Web for a weapon against them: Rick Astley's 1987 single "Never Gonna Give You Up." The Wall Street Journal reports that Michael Silveira "Rickrolled" the voice mailboxes of the company making the calls, and others have turned to threats and hacking attacks.

Phone numbers for Auto One Warranty Specialists Inc., the company behind the automated calls, were posted on the social news site Reddit.com. Silveira left the company multiple messages consisting only of "Never Gonna Give You Up," the video for which has become the punchline of the popular Internet prank known as "Rickrolling." Rickrolling has grown from its roots in Web forums to infiltrate YouTube's main page and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade .

"I thought, if you get a bunch of people together, you could blow up their voice-mail boxes," Silveira said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some people have gone beyond simple pranks or mailbox bombing to threatening arson or changing the voice mail greetings on Auto One phone systems. Auto One president David Tabb said that the marketing firms he hires to make the automated calls are instructed to call only those who have opted in to receiving solicitation calls, and claimed that "Ninety percent of the people complaining about my company have never been contacted by my company."

On Friday, a Chicago federal court issued restraining orders against three companies accused of making calls for Auto One, the New York Times reported .