Do you get spam calls?

[Peelee]

PAYG (pay as you go) is critical. PAYG is designed for poor people. Scammers target the rich, because they have money that they might be conned out of. If you don't want spam, switch to PAYG.

Then the spammers will switch too, but they'll have to filter out the poor people, and that will be *interesting*.

I can think of at least one type of scammer that targets the poor, to frighteningly effective results, but forum rules prevent me from saying who.

Actually, after writing that last bit, make that two types of scammers.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Hold on just a damn second. UK has spam callers that try to get you to buy convervatories?!? Even y'alls spammers are higher class than ours!

I never thought I would say this, but can I sig this?

(with a minor modification to the fifth word...)

[Peelee]

I never thought I would say this, but can I sig this?

(with a minor modification to the fifth word...)

Have at it!

[DataNinja]

Actually, after writing that last bit, make that two types of scammers.

And then there's a different kind, given that that's just a bot repost of something from earlier in the thread.

[Peelee]

And then there's a different kind, given that that's just a bot repost of something from earlier in the thread.

And I didn't even get a chance to buy a conservatory out of it!

[Glorthindel]

Our favourite office game is to put spam callers on speakerphone, claim a "call on another line", pretend to put them on hold, then place the phone by our computer speakers and play a series of the most inappropriate songs we can find on youtube. You can sometimes get them to stick around on the line for quite some time if you keep going back on the phone for a few seconds every couple of songs (our current record is 7 songs)

The winner so far is the guy who laughed and remarked "this has made my day" before hanging up after listening to South Parks 'Chocolate Salty Balls' (he listened to the whole thing before hanging up).

[Narwhalz]

Soooooooo many 19 second recorded spam voice messages.

[2D8HP]

Soooooooo many 19 second recorded spam voice messages.

Yeah, I seldom get live people anymore, but when I still had a land line and was listed in the phone book (early mid 1990's) I got a lot of calls from "creditors" wanting to be paid money that I didn't owe.

Once a creditor called me a different middle name, and with a couple hours on the web (this was when we had dial up so it often took many minutes for a page to load) I found the guy who I suspect the creditors were looking for, he was a decade older thsn me, and lived one city over.

Before I permanently unplugged the land line, when "creditors" called demanding payment, I'd say "You say I owe you money, what's my middle name then?"

A decade later a co-worker (Roy, so sometimes I imagine the OotS Roy as my former co-worker) would take these calls on his cell phone during lunch, and his responses would floor us laughing:

"Nah, I'm not going to pay you the money, y'all the ones stupid enough to give it to me, if you'd look at my record you'd know not to do that, so you out"

True words of wisdom!

[arcas]

Is your # on the DNC registry? If not put it there! No one is supposed to call your number for any sort of solicitation, marketing, etc when your number is on that list. To be honest though some spammers don't seem to care. I answer now and tell them not to call again that my number is on the DNC, and usually it works. If they keep bothering you regardless, if you can find out what business it is you can report them to the BBB.

[2D8HP]

Me and my wife have been getting lots of pre-recorded messages in Chinese lately, apparently we're not alone:

Yes, It's Bad. Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging.
-New York Times

[Zollqir]

I get a call about once a month from a mysterious robot voice speaking in chinese. To this day I have absolutely no idea what it's saying, or what it wants.

[Algeh]

I get a call about once a month from a mysterious robot voice speaking in chinese. To this day I have absolutely no idea what it's saying, or what it wants.

In my heart, I want to believe it's an awesome adventure hook, but it's probably just a Chinese-language version of the same kind of spam calls you're already getting.

Back before robo-calls were common, my friend with a Vietnamese last name used to have a lot of trouble with Vietnamese-language human telemarketers trying to sell him long distance telephone service. He didn't speak any Vietnamese, but his father was a refugee from Vietnam, so there was always an off-chance it was a relative who didn't speak English and was trying to track them down, so it was a big hassle where you had to try figure out what the person on the phone wanted.

We put the phone account under my name when we lived together to avoid this issue - I have one of those absurdly common last names that so many people in America have that no one really can make assumptions about non-English languages you might speak based on it. (My father has the joy of having a first and last name combination so common that there are a double digit number of them in his metro area. It's lots of fun when one of the other ones goes into collections and he gets debt collectors going through the phone book trying to find the one they're looking for. There were times in the 70s or 80s when he couldn't get anyone to take his checks at the grocery store due to someone else's bad checks.)

[Bohandas]

Is your # on the DNC registry? If not put it there! No one is supposed to call your number for any sort of solicitation, marketing, etc when your number is on that list. To be honest though some spammers don't seem to care. I answer now and tell them not to call again that my number is on the DNC, and usually it works. If they keep bothering you regardless, if you can find out what business it is you can report them to the BBB.

Since when do professional con artists care about the law and have businesses that actual exist?

[factotum]

Since when do professional con artists care about the law and have businesses that actual exist?

Most spam calls are made by legit businesses trying to sell services or goods to people, not professional con artists, so yes, they need to pay attention to these things.

[Peelee]

Most spam calls are made by legit businesses trying to sell services or goods to people, not professional con artists, so yes, they need to pay attention to these things.

If the money they make off doing something is significantly more than the fees they pay getting caught doing that thing, then no, they don't.

Of course, that's really a whole 'nother discussion there.

[TechnOkami]

Yes, interestingly.

In my local area, I've gotten several calls from a Chinese machine lady. On a subreddit for my city, there was an open thread which talked about the same thing, and apparently it's an ongoing scam to get people of predominantly Chinese ethnicity in order to scare them into giving up personal information. Only mildly annoying, really.