Ask HN: Why am I suddenly getting spam calls on my cell phone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why am I suddenly getting spam calls on my cell phone?

6 pointscoreyp_16 comments

I've always heard of people getting spam calls, but as recently as 6 months ago, I never received any, and I have used this # for almost a decade. Now, all of the sudden, I get several robocalls a day! I don't know what has changed, but it's downright annoying!

I pay for this phone, not them!

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A large chunk - maybe 25% - of data leaks are inside jobs, not remote hacking or sloppiness on the user's part. Let's say your bank has your phone number. It won't release that... officially, but if an employee has a chance to copy 400k phone numbers and sell them and pocket some real cash for almost no effort, they may well do exactly that. I don't know what the confidentiality half-life of information held by legit companies who mean well is, but I know it's decreasing. Once the number is sold, it will be resold, a lot.

A list of valid phone numbers isn't needed. Calling every phone in a desired area code -- or even every phone number in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) -- is perfectly feasible for a robo-caller.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that phoning numbers in sequence (or chosen at random) will get you a real person on every 6th call.

Briefly, my calculation is 293 area codes x 7.9M possible numbers per area code (not 10M because some number formats aren't allowed) divided by 360M (population of the NANP countries, principally US and Canada, and assuming 1 phone per person) implies that every 6th number is assigned.

I have noticed this too. Large increase in the number of spam calls and texts I get in the last few months.

OP here. I just received another robocall 30 seconds after posting my original query!

Have you used Craigslist lately?

Aside from the scammers & farmers, I have been suspecting(correlations suggest) their new-ish email system doubles as a number scraper, as well.

No, I don't use Craigslist. Good warning, though!

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