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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

My favourite response was this one where they flooded the callback numbers with robocalls 28x/second for 3 days until they killed the number.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4

More details here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-...

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Does this work for spoofed numbers? I thought if you call back you just get the person that got spoofed, not the actual spammer.

You've hit the nail on the head- thats the problem- the number isn't real. I have gotten at least half a dozen callbacks/texts asking "who dis" or "why did you call me"? when the reality is my number ended up in the robodialer spooferator 5000 number generator. The only way to really stop it would be for everyone to stay on the line and waste the telemarketers/scammers time until they realized they had no viable business. Unfortunately, that is a really hard problem to solve.

A lot of the robocallers just play a pre-recorded message asking you to call back.

That’s when the flooding works.

A lot of the scammers are just call-centres that outsource the lead generation. By flooding the call-back number, their campaign that they paid for goes down the drain.

This is exactly what I do and it does appear to reduce the number of calls significantly - I get two or three a day between my two cell numbers and work phone but not every day. I also noticed scammers are trying to counter it by asking to press multiple keys e.g. a recent "final courtesy call about your extended car warranty" first asked to press 1 to talk to the operator, than it asked to press 3 if my car had some number of miles then it just asked to press 8 without any other prompts. So people getting to the operator seems to hurt them if they are willing to drop a certain number of potential chumps who will mess up multiple phone prompts.

Many voip services just fucking make up a number (or derive it somehow, but incorrectly) when numbers show as blocked or 'unknown' on normal lines. It's incredibly misleading and annoying, so even legitimate calls from blocked numbers get people calling some random person back.

I don't know for certain, but my guess is that it does not.

I don't quite know what the purpose of the spammers using neighbor spoofing is, because generally if you actually respond to those calls, they hang up on the other end. Maybe it's fishing for potential victims that they'll target with another method?

The nature of the scam spam though probably relies on the ability of the victim to call back, so those numbers are not spoofed.

Seems like an effective use for Lenny: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-v...

Did they make the script's source public? I'd love to run this for myself on some of the numbers pretending there is a warrant our for my arrest because I owe some ridiculous amount of back taxes.

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