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.
I disagree: it's good advice. The fact that the phone rings at all flags it as "in service". Out-of-service numbers immediately hit a recording stating that the phone has been disconnected.
Their systems attempt to categorize your number based on what they hear. Possible options are voicemail, IVR systems, fax machines, live person, etc. When they don't hear anything at all, they can't categorize that number for more targeted scams.
The only thing I would add is "never hang up". Mute your phone, and just wait for them to hang up. Hanging up tells their systems that something or someone is listening and responding. Leaving them hanging tells them nothing.
Not how that works. Check my other comments here for that. Unless you are being pedantic and hyperfocusing on my verbiage instead of the overall message, in that case, I bid you adeu.
On my cell phone, I used to receive 3 to 5 calls a day. I started answering them on mute about two years ago. I'm down to fewer than one a month. Your claim that this practice will only increase calls is not supported by my observations.
Their "business model" expects people to not answer. They don't get charged for a call until someone or something answers, and they hang up before your voicemail picks up. There is no incentive for them to purge your number from their lists.
Answering, and remaining silent starts costing them money, without any indication or expectation that they will speak to a human.
I installed a PBX with an automated attendant on my family's business line, which immediately answers on the first ring. The incoming call logs initially showed the system was intercepting 2-4 scam calls per hour, with none of them getting through to a person. Within a couple months, I was logging only a handful a day.
They don't care about numbers that don't answer; those numbers don't cost them anything. They might not have been answered today, but a human might answer one tomorrow.
What they don't want are numbers that are known to be answered by non-humans. They don't want to pay for their autodialer to talk to fax machines, IVRs, or other machines they can't scam.
When you answer on mute, they can't determine that you are human. To them, you are a machine, and they have the tiniest incentive (a fraction of a cent per minute, multiplied by the total number of every machine they reach) to purge your number.
You're mentioning facts not in evidence. Most people answer the phone and say hello. I've heard this silent advice before but was not in the mood to add another paragraph and start splitting those hairs.
Most people do not answer the phone and stay silent, that's why I said what I said the way I said it. I presumed that OP and others here were answering the phone as most people do. So yes, my advice is accurate. And yes you added to the discussion. Maybe you should have put this top level so maybe OP and others see it.
Then you were completely off topic from your first comment, because that was the explicitly stated condition specified in the top level comment: "Pick up the phone, say nothing, and mute it."
The person who needed to see it was you.
Who needed to see what? Advice telling people that are getting a ton of spam calls to waste time answering and trying to be crypt silent instead of just not answering?
I think it's you who needed to see your own advice for the nonsense it is. If you think that the systems in place these days can't tell when a phone is answered even if you stay silent, which isn't always possible because mics these days can pick up noise from across the room, I've got no more words which honestly is a feat worth celebrating, good job.
Where did I suggest they could? Of course they know the call was answered. But they don't know whether the answer is a "who" or a "what". They don't want to be dialing "whats", they only want to be calling a "who".
When you dial a number, you could be connected to a person, an interactive voice response attendant ("Press one for English"), a fax machine, voicemail, and old answering machine, a modem, or many other kinds of machines configured to answer that call.
The trick isn't to "not answer" (especially since your voicemail is going to answer for you if you don't, and immediately tell them that you're a human and capable of receiving calls.)
The trick is to convince their autodialer that you're an unknown machine, not a human. To do that, you don't have to be silent as the crypt. You just can't make any human-sounding noises: don't say "hello".
Pick up the phone, press the "answer" button, press "mute", and put the phone down. Let their machine listen to dead air for awhile, before deciding to hang up.
So that enough times, and they will start purging your number from their lists, along with every other non-responsive machine number that costs them money to dial.
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.