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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to do this, but they have my phone number. I really don't want to have to get a new one if they get pissed enough to make it unusable.

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They have little incentive to bother you once it's clear you aren't falling for it. The more of their time you waste, the more likely you'll get to some permanent blacklist which is good.

You would think so, and that was what I was trying to do, to get on some black list, but less then a week later they called me again, this time a woman called, but I didn't have the time to redo the whole thing again.

They might not put you on a blacklist, but they definitely won't single you out to waste more of their own time.

Also, it might be a different company, I imagine competition is fierce.

The company's not going to bother me, but it just takes one stalkery-minded person to start a personal vendetta. As someone with a unique name and a variety of Googlable data, I try to be fairly careful about who I piss off.

Let him have his vendetta. What is someone in India who is so poor he needs to work on the phones for one of these scammers going to do?

It would take quite a while to save up for a plane ticket, and they would be risking their job if they abused their access to the phone system. If they somehow do own that scam business, then anything they do risks their profit margin.

Really not hard to imagine how someone half the world away could make life miserable for someone - SWATting, bomb threats to kids' schools, harassing phone calls. All already happen regularly.

I suppose you are right in some extreme sense and technical sense. I would be opening myself up to those repurcussions, but we are all open to them all the time and I would like to think the FBI or whatever SWAT team would send an officer over for a chat after getting an anonymous call from India, instead of just busting a door down.

The foolishness of such moves is why they are newsworthy and many things must fail to make then happen. Perhaps this is why the wikipedia list[1] of them numbers 15 and many several federal charges against the person. These are all crimes that open up that business to risk and legal repercussion. The last thing a scam business wants is an international incident drawing attention to them. I almost welcome if it means the long term shutdown of those parasites.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Notable_cases

"Notable victims" doesn't mean "no other victims". Among other things, some police departments are attempting to reduce the incidence of them by not publicizing them. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/swatting-lapd-to-keep-quiet-abou...

These don't appear as "anonymous calls from India". Just like the spam calls, the caller IDs are spoofed to appear local.

You can use last number barring to block their calls. My best attempt at wasting their time was 28 minutes - normally would not bother but I was ill and needed something to distract me.

They spoof caller ID data. I rarely if ever receive a same-number spam call. If they wanted to make my phone number unusable, they could.

Android nowadays marks calls as "suspected spam", worked great. In general, if it's important enough, the caller leaves a message. Otherwise, it's not important and I don't care about it.

That's great, and iOS now has a similar feature.

It has zero effectiveness if someone decides to send a hundred thousand spoofed VoIP calls at you because you lost them their spammer/malware job by stringing them along.

There's no way for them to do that for free -- VoIP calls to PSTN still cost money.

Tell them you aren't at the computer right now so you need a number to call them back on. Call them back from a burner phone/Skype.

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