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.
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.