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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

I did a cross-continent drive last month with my T-Mobile US phone and got a rude awakening of how real-time this is when the “source” area codes of all the spammy phone calls followed me from state to state.

e: I thought I had opted out of everything that was opt-out-able in TMo's privacy settings <https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/dashboard/controls> years ago when I first set up my line/account, but I just checked again and more than half of the settings were enabled. Hate that I have to be in the habit of looking for new settings that default to enabled.

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This! I did a long drive last week and was surprised that spam calls knew exactly the area code I was in. Realtime …

Chilling realization

Is it possible that some background app is polling and selling this info rather than your carrier?

How are the economics supposed to work here? Is the data so cheap they can get everyone's location several times a day despite having no need for it? What's in it for the carrier then?

I relocated during the pandemic and brought my existing (Los Angeles area code) number to the SF Bay Area with Mint Mobile. I really don't get local area code spam after five years. The few calls that do happen, I can trace by topic back to local business interactions I've had.

I'm not sure whether to think the Mint MVNO on T-Mobile is better about privacy than T-Mobile. Or do you have some phone apps that are really the guilty party linking your phone number to your travel locations...?

Weird! 99% of my spam calls come from the same area code as my cellphone number.

I think they mean scammers have adapted to targeting the area-codes your phone appears to be located now, as opposed to (just) the area code where you originally got your phone number.

For a lot of people the difference won't be apparent, because they haven't moved.

Exactly

I have definitely moved.

I got barely any spam calls on Tmo, but I recently switched away and am crying for mercy. They have an opt-in service that prevents 90% of them from reaching your phone, and it's free. ATT has a similar one. I wish Consumer Cellular did, and I'm almost thinking about going back to big carrier prices for big carrier features like that.

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