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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

Yes, amazed at how many local numbers are spam. I get three a lot:

1. Vacation Rewards Center - selling cruises I think

2. Business line of credit - their phrasing make it sound like I called them ("Hey, just getting back to you about that $15k line of credit)

3. Tax scare tactics, trying to settle debt or penalties

I didn't know who feel for this stuff until I talked to an older gentleman who said he got these calls and it took him a long time and encouragement from his friends to know it was a scam.

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"this call is in reference to your credit account...there are no current problems with your account, please press 1 to be connected to an operator that can share an amazing opportunity for you $something"

I've never clicked '1', and never felt I've missed out, but I've gotten that same call from local numbers in my same block maybe 50 times already this year.

I always punch 1. I feel its my civic duty to waste 10 minutes of their time (usually while speaking in my best Monty Python accents).

The interesting thing is that I usually only get a person 1/2 the time. The system just glitches to hangup the rest of the time.

I get these things multiple times per day.

It's not a glitch. This sort of system (which will be some form of predictive dialler) relies upon there being far more in-progress calls than human agents. Sometimes, therefore, there's no available agent to connect a person to. This nature of such systems is why some countries regulate them.

I started doing the same a few weeks ago. It could be a coincidence but the number of calls seems to decrease. Not that I was getting a lot but now I go for many days without any at all. I just get to the life person and put the phone on mute. As far as my disruption goes it's about the same but I imagine the scammer's cost raises manyfold: they pay a lot more for the time on the line and their operators get disrupted on top of that. If I get a call to last a minute vs 3 seconds it takes to hang up it already makes my number an order of magnitude more expensive to call vs. a number that hangs up/does not answer.

I received a call from a very angry lady in my local exchange who was convinced I was calling her all of the time. I tried to explain number spoofing to her, but not sure she got it. In any case, we've mutually blocked each other now.

I get voice mails (calls I don't recognize and don't pick up, but in area code calls) in Chinese about once a week --weird.

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