I got one of those yesterday. I actually listened for about 30 seconds to see if I could understand anything, but nope. Not a word.
Here’s the slightly more intelligent way of trying to run the scam that I originally posted back in August. It showed up on the Daily WTF today. It’s a screenshot, so click to embiggen/enlargen/enlighten/make bigger.
Protip: if you’re going to use variables in your scam, test to make sure the variables actually work.
So there’s a scammer that doesn’t seem to know how to cycle the spoofing on their caller ID or they don’t want to bother with it and one person who has that phone number is getting hit by everyone trying to contact them to find out why they called.
Here’s a tip, everyone: stop blindly calling unknown numbers back simply because they called you. If they have a legitimate reason for calling you, they will leave you a message if you don’t answer.
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I thought this was just common sense. Which unfortunately ain’t that common.
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If it really is important, they will call back.
And truecaller helps a lot to identify who is who - simply do a manual search for the number in question on truecaller before calling back.
Had a bit of an oddball show up on my home line. Our answering machine has a feature where it prompts the caller to enter a digit on their keypad before it will even ring in the house. Since most telemarketers use robo-dialers that alone has cut our telemarketer calls to nearly zero.
The few calls that do get through ( I mean, other than ones intended for us) are almost always wrong numbers, charities, or political fund raising.
But this one…
If you do a web search on the number everyone seems to agree it’s a scam “debt collector.” But it must have actual humans, since a machine wouldn’t know to press the key.
But the rules are the same for home versus cell when a human hears the phone ring: Look at the number. Don’t know it? Don’t answer.
No message from my mysterious legit/ not-legit caller.
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My sister never answers her home phone. Ever. She has it set to record a message after one ring. She will return appropriate calls, but feels that she is special this way. I tried to get her to understand that if everyone did this, nobody would ever be able to connect by phone. Might just as well stick to texting.
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I haven’t had a home phone since 2005. And I can count on one hand how many people I know in 2018 who are under the age of 60 and have one.
I’m under 60 and have a home phone, sorta. I have a MagicJack, just so I can keep the number, but there is no phone attached (or maybe one with the ringer off, can’t remember - it’s off in a corner somewhere) and it is set to go straight to voice mail. I only ever get messages from robocalls and scammers. Anyone who knows me or does business with me has my cell numbers.
People with kids too young for cell phones but old enough to have friends that call. Also people with latchkey kids in the same age range.
That’s the only reason my daughter got a phone at 10. I didn’t want to maintain a home line anymore and I didn’t want giggling requests for my daughter to be half my call volume. Now, it turns out she’s not the phone bug her sisters were, but it’s just as well.
I keep mine since 1) It’s been our number for a long time and 2) Cincy Bell keeps generators on their circuits in case power goes out.
VOIP providers, generally speaking, do not.
The last time we had a major storm event I experimentally tried the cell circuits… and that’s why I keep the land line.
That’s 4 people here in CoG that have a landline as well 
We keep ours for a number of reasons
- We have had it forever (well before cell phones were a thing)
- My in-laws always ring the landline despite having been given our cell phone numbers multiple times
- We have pre-paid phones and the numbers aren’t published anywhere so our landline is the only number that is published. This has actually been a good thing as a couple of our friends lost their phones and hadn’t got their contacts stored in the cloud.
Add me to the land line list. The cell I have is company issued. Of course, I do qualify as an “old fogey” so it’s probably inertia more than anything else.
Dabbsy’s done a fine one again, this time picking a scammer’s email apart and mocking him/her.
Here’s it in all its goodness :
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+1
I’ve tried to get rid of our landline several times, but either VOIP was just terrible or some other failure caused us to return.
Man, I feel gypped. The scammer that contacted me back in August couldn’t be bothered to threaten to release the video on physical media like a videotape.
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We have one. I don’t think we’d save anything by getting rid of it. We actually have a floor on each floor of our townhouse (basement, ground floor, top floor) but rarely pick up.
A few people ($Wife’s parents, mainly) might call the number if it’s an emergency, which is about the only reason we don’t have the ringers turned off. Otherwise, it gets 2-4 calls/day from spammers roughly 1 a day leaving a message I have to clean out.
I’m very glad you have floors on each floor of your dwelling.
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Floors? Psssh. Luxury. I used to DREAM of having floors.
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It’s a luxury option, I admit.