yea there was a change in law that allowed spammers to use your local area code for this precise reason. Not sure if you noticed, all spam calls lately are from your area code.
Yeah it was a rather amazing (and perverse) shift. The other day a spammer called me from a number less than 10 off of mine. They must have a bank of numbers they select from based on hamming distance, as I've seen near-permutations of my number as well.
They are usually spoofing the number when they're close to yours. Hoping you'll be curious and pickup.
citation? I belive that this local number spoofing is just a meme that's caught on within the junk calling industry. The people making these calls are already in violation of a pile of laws, but they don't care. Number spoofing was always something that was available to them, but not something they knew how to use effectively until recently. I highly doubt a change in the law changed their behavior that significantly.