Area code blocked for privacy but it is spoofed from my phones number which I have not lived there in many years
Start answering. Use a heavy accent in whatever you can do. Agree with them and go along, keep working up the ladder. Then give one of the higher ups the most schizo sexual nonsense you can come up with.
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.
No, it’s because of how poorly obscured it is in the 5th one from the top in particular - there’s no other numbers it could be.
I really don’t understand lazy censoring. You can either not use the thin pen tool or just spend a few more seconds making sure it’s unreadable. What’s the point of doing it at all if people can still decipher what you’re obscuring?
Honestly I didn’t try that hard. I don’t live there anymore nor do I know anyone or anything that is still there so who cares if people know I guess
I agree with the other reply and would honestly love an answer, if only to get a peek under the hood of people who do this.
If you didn’t try that hard because you didn’t care, again, why did you even bother? It’s like trying to scoop water with a colander, on some level you have to know it’s wasted effort, right?
What?! That’s impossible! Banks are credible, reliable, trustworthy! Cryptocurrencies, those are the baddies.
Definitely not 989. lol
Looks like you got phished. Doubt that was the real bank site. Suggest you change your passwords if you logged in to that site, too.
Banks and hospitals sell your information, too.
When my wife gave birth to our son at the hospital, I have to put down my phone number as part of the check in form. Immediately the next day I got call for “Home care services for new mom and baby”.
Oh totally. But they don’t sync that information “immediately”. Nor would they ever want to because then the user would know that’s where the information came from.
I don’t think they really care if it’s not actually illegal.
Or they could sell the data in bulk. And the day I put in my number just happens to be the day they sell their database.
