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Comment by abakker | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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