Area code blocked for privacy but it is spoofed from my phones number which I have not lived there in many years
Never answer, the scammers sell data to each other. As soon as you answer, they know they’ve got a live number and the number of calls will multiply.
Also there’s millions of them, pissing off a couple doesn’t really do anything.
I think the scam calls are annoying, but it takes basically no effort to ignore them when I’m not in the mood to mess with them, so I don’t mind them so much.
I figure though if I can keep one tied up talking to me for a few minutes that’s one less chance for them to be scamming someone’s grandmother. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean, but it’s still potentially one less person getting scammed that day, and that’s worth something.
Yes and no, if you scambait hard enough your number can eventually be added to a blacklist for larger scam organisations that bought your data for use in multiple scam attempts.
In my experience that has really cut down on the calls.
In 2020 the department of human services accidentally posted my personal phone number on a list of support services for people experiencing housing or food insecurity. This number was then circulated by every major news source in my state. I couldn’t change my number at the time because I had no legal ID (still don’t… Can’t figure out how to get ID without ID, but I have a new number now at least) at first I didn’t really notice the ratio of spam calls to genuine calls for the wrong number (ie, people calling my number because they needed housing/food) . I just remember getting 40+ calls a day at many stages.
But as the actual number for the food relief service was circulated, I eventually stopped getting genuine calls and I was getting 3-5 scam calls every single day.
After a year of scam baiting, I was getting 2 a week.
Now, I’ll do something online that requires sharing my current number, within a few hours I get a scam call because my data has been sold, but I bait the heck out of that first call and I usually don’t receive any further calls which suggest my number was blacklisted by a larger scam organisation, and I won’t be hassled until my data is sold again as a new item.
It’s hard to avoid getting your number on scam lists when the largest health insurance company, and the second largest telecommunications company in my country both had major data breaches where millions of customers identifying information was accessed and sold to scammers…
Go to your DMV with your birth certificate, social security card, and a utility bill with your name and proof of address for a replacement id.
Lol, yeah, just cuz you answered means good data. I’m sure they love wasting time and money on known scambaiters. I get maybe 1 scam call every other month for the last 5+ years from US scammers. Zero Indians after I told that one guy a decade ago I was uploading him to YouTube. But you do you. I’m just going to keep enjoying not getting spam calls.
