A Boring Dystopia

Oh no, I am sorry for your loss. Yeah, Bernie is the one politician that I would expect to not sell your personal phone number, but he cannot control every single person all the way through his entire campaign staff, and it looks like someone, somewhere leaked it.:(

You have been identified as someone who is "vulnerable to this form of persuasion", just b/c you gave a single damn about someone, all of once. Consent means nothing to these MFers.

And somewhere early on in Trump's reign of terror, laws were changed and re-codified and staff were swapped out and also the FCC was de-funded (along with the SEC) and to make a long story short, they can get away with this crap much more easily than they could before.

If it helps, the only thing I have found that is foolproof is to put the phone in "Do Not Disturb" mode permanently. That can allow exceptions for callers already in your Contacts list, often also allowing people to get through to you it if they call twice from the same number within the space of a few minutes (e.g. a hospital that would register as an unknown caller but has a legitimate purpose for such). The only other alternative would be to use a special app to try to recognize known spam callers, but that is a constant cat-and-mouse game, not only for the callers identities but also with the app itself that keeps getting its databases or codebases hacked by malicious actors, so I just use Do Not Disturb.

Eventually they may give up if they have seen no activity or proper response from you, but I can virtually guarantee that that process will be measured in YEARS not days, especially this year. So: Do Not Disturb may be your only salvation:-(.