Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwint | Hacker News Reader

A couple years ago I committed to answering all phone calls and keeping spammers on the line as long as possible. Within a couple weeks it had real effect, and now I’m legitimately excited when the rare spammer calls me.

Probably 2h net investment for the near-guarantee that calls to my phone are legit. Totally worth it.

Steps:

(1) If it’s a robot, punch numbers until you get to a human. (2) Act like you’re 120yrs old, incompetent, and forgetful. Tell them some stories about your great-grandson on the baseball team. (3) When they call you on it, switch to your real persona and just tell them you’re setting the phone down on the table and they’ll have to hang up. They hate hanging up, it messes up their stats or something.

This is how you get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones in India labeled “unprofitable_numbers.txt”.

View on HN

I'll do you one better: When they call, sincerely start asking them questions about the identity of their business: location, name, ownership, etc. Usually they'll hang up. Call them back over and over with these questions. Then after a few calls, explain that you know how to use "VOIP APIs" and that you will be happy to spend $100 to DOS attack their call center.

That would be illegal, but typically they're in no position to run to the law. Also, I don't know what a "VOIP API" is or if it's possible to use to DOS attack someone with it. But there's probably an API out there that you could use for that, so the threat seems to be enough.

You can shortcut all the effort with eight words, in my experience:

"Would you like to join a trade union?"

"Have you heard the good word?" Bam, down to 6 words with a 95% hangup rate. Problem is that 5%....

Calling back never works for me because they always use spoofed numbers. This is why blocking is ineffective.

“They hate hanging up, it messes up their stats or something.”

Could this be one reason why they often get really angry in scambaiting videos? To try to make the other person hang up?

Best to avoid hitting any numbers. It's a good way to accidentally "agree" to charges billed to your phone number.

Good point. I’m mostly talking about following the phone tree (the vehicle extended warranty people needed you to hit 1 to get to a human). Definitely a good call not to just mash numbers.

mashing numbers was for a long time the best way to get a call transferred to a human untill they figured out it was just people breaking out of the ivr loops

By what means?

Collect calls.

Good to know! I've recently started getting a ton a spam calls (8-10/day) and was assuming the situation was hopeless. Will give your method a go :)

Oh wow I didn't think of that. Very recently I've received multiple calls from unknown numbers. I'm going to try this next time.

I keep on getting calls for fundraisers by robots. When I ask to talk to a human the woman says 'oh it's a real human here'.

I'll bash the numbers to check if next time I get a human.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com