this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Pick up the phone, say nothing and mute it. Unless you have a good reason to answer it, leave it be. Hang up after 30 seconds of they dont. The more sophisticated spammers will write you off as an automated system.
If it's a human who should reach you, they'll assume it was a bad connection and say hello after 10 seconds or so.
This is bad advice. All this does is is flag the number as in service and it will get even more calls.
Aside from the advice I gave in another set of comments, you could and should check with your cell provider and turn on spam blocking if they offer it.
I have a total of 5 numbers across 2 phones, 2 at GV and 1 at textnow. I get very very few spam calls and texts. I very rarely answer the phone for a number I don't recognize, I let it go to vm and then if it's legit and important I'll consider calling them back. I keep my phone on silent and all calls and notifications go through my watch so I am not listening to the phone ring especially when I am working.
That's not how it works. If the number rings at all, it's in service. They know your number is valid before you even pick up.
That's not how that works. Maybe you don't understand how these call centers work. These days it's usually a bot dialing a list of numbers and flagging any with a person answering as one for a real person to call to sell/scam/whatever.
I'm hoping for your sake that you are just being pedantic and hyperfocusing on my verbiage instead of the overall message.
Tried this a couple of times, but they kept calling my junk phone. I got like 7 or 8 calls the day after Thanksgiving. I block the numbers, but the next number will just be one or two digits different
I keep the junk phone for things like shopping clubs, pharmacy reminders, etc. I have a seperate number for people and trusted sources (though I realize that anyone can be compromised. I'll get a fresh number once that happens again)
Anyway, point is- I dont think they're human scammers. At least not the ones calling me
It's bad advice. Just stop answering the ones you don't recognize. If you have android, Googles phone app is pretty good at giving you the name of the company that is calling you (assuming it's not spoofed). It's also pretty good at flagging calls and texts that might be spam. If you are waiting for a call from your mechanic for example, it will usually show you that its Firestone or NTB or whatever calling.
Stop answering spam calls and they will eventually go away. If they don't go away or seem like they are waning, you might have someone fucking with you and it's time for a new number that you don't give out to anyone. I do the same with email. I have ProtonMail and I have a few aliases that I use for specific purposes, if/when one them is leaked/sold/traded/whatever, I will temporarily pause that address and eventually it will get flagged as a bad one and they will stop coming.
They do not go away. I have literally forgotten about this phone to the point of it being dead/drained for an extended period of time... they calls never stop
Have you turned on spam protection from your carrier? And as I said in another comment, if you port the number to GV or the like and let it sit, it will eventually stop getting calls. It also depends on what you mean by extended periods of time and if you then start answering the calls even when you aren't expecting a call or don't recognize the number.
I've answered two recently, but hadn't answered them for about 6 mo to a year or so.
Before that- probably 3 years ago, now, I contacted the carrier about spam texts from websites and that stopped, though I still get spam texts from numbers (mostly political)
This number belonged to someone who was ditching creditors, so I think they eventually sold the number and it just gets passed around. Half the reason I keep it is so that it doesnt get released to someone else (it's like something out of a pass-it-along horror movie)
Most of the time I dont care, but occationally I leave the volume up for some reason and end up with a 6am wake up spam call. I can ignore it 90% of the time
They usually hang up as soon as you pick up most of the time, just bots checking if it's a real number for some reason
Probably more likely they dial more calls than they can scam on the basis that a silent hang up call costs them only the cost of connecting the call, but their scammer's wages cost them more if not enough people answer and there is no one for the scammer to speak to.
It's essentially putting the cost of uncertain numbers of people answering onto the victims rather than the scammer - selfish, but so is scamming people!
Telemarketers do the same thing, although at least they often have to fear their local regulators in many countries if they do it too much, while scammers are criminals who are going to break the law anyway, so I suspect most silent calls are probably scammers.
Nope. What they said is accurate. Some of them are bots calling and then flagging that as a good number when a person answers.
The autodialer "knows" that the overwhelming majority of people will not answer. It is trying to keep all the human attendants as busy as possible. If it sees that two attendants are available to answer calls, it doesn't place two calls; it places 20, or maybe 200 calls simultaneously, and transfers the first two answered calls to the humans. After that, it doesn't have another human available to receive a call, so it just hangs up on any of the other 18 or 198 people who also answered.
It is better for the scammers to hang up on a dozen people than to have one of their workers unengaged.