It’s amazing how we’ve allowed a lack of regulation to completely destroy a fundamental form of modern communication. You basically can’t call a stranger and expect them to answer the phone, everyone is screening all their calls because more than half are scams!
If it’s a an expected country code, answer the phone.
If it’s an unexpected country code, leave it alone.
If it’s a phone call, leave it alone. They’ll leave a message if it’s important.
Does this work somewhere? In Canada, spam calls are always my country code (which is shared with the US). Area code means little these days, too. Spammers will just spoof numbers.
Well it is a decent first level of defense. I usually get foreign country codes. But obviously don’t trust local numbers either. Let them introduce themselves (don’t introduce yourself) and ask if you can call them back in a minute. In the minute, check if the number is really who they claim to be. Then call the number if it matches and you are interested in the conversation.
Why has this ladies laptop been given military medals and seen the global war on terrorism and desert storm?
Probably as she lives on coronation street, so she’s seen a lot of crazy stuff. Murders, rapes bombs etc. It’s not as safe popping into Rita’s shop for the newspaper and baked beans as it once was.
Except that 90% of the time you answer and it just hangs up because it’s testing to see if the line is active to sell to telemarketers
If I don’t know who it is then I’m not answering shit. I don’t even bother looking up the numbers anymore because they all come from spoofed caller IDs now, and if you answer you’ll get 1000 more scam calls immediately because now they know you’re dumb enough to pick up
They’re getting ballsy these days too. I’m required to answer the phone at work because it’s a business line, but as a result we get an absolute ton of spam or empty lines. I’ve had them spoof the local hospital’s phone number several times. I got a call from the motherfuckin’ USDA the other day (allegedly), like the government agency. Empty line. Once I got a call on my cell phone from my own phone number, that was interesting.
When the scammers spoof numbers they usually just get a block of random numbers that are local to where they are calling, then they just try them one at a time. They pick numbers that look local because people are more likely to answer.
They never actually bother verifying whose number they’re using though, so it frequently results in them calling from the persons own number who they are trying to scam, local businesses, and even local government numbers.
I work for the phone company and I’ve frequently gotten calls from people telling me someone just called them from their own number lol
Is there a way to figure out who is actually calling? Is there anyway to crack down on this?
