Easy trick: Every time you get a spam call, answer it. Talk to them until _they_ hang up. String them along. Put them on speakerphone and keep working. Feed them fake credit card numbers (there are generators out there that create numbers that checksum correctly, so they type them into whatever they're using to bill numbers. Hopefully this helps flag them as a bad actor to the processors, idk).

It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious.

My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good.

Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.