It is early afternoon on a Wednesday and I have had SIX of those calls where no one is there. And caller ID claims they are from smallish towns in my state (Twisp Wa, Fife Wa, Olympia, etc) but I know spammers can make it from anywhere they want. I am home recovering from minor surgery so out of curiosity/boredom I’ve been answering them today. And they aren’t the traditional “your car warranty is expiring” or “we’ve noticed activity on your account”, “do you want to sell your house” BS. Just SILENCE. Not even heavy breathing.
Why? What can someone gain from this?
In: Other
One method:
* Get a list of contacts by either:
* Buy a unfiltered / unvetted list of contacts
* Generate a list of sequential numbers
* Call everyone on the list
* See who answers
* Sell a list of “good” contacts filtered to numbers who are willing to answer unsolicited calls
If you pick up and say hello, they know it’s a live number they can sell to other scammers.
If you pick up, you’re put on a list of phone numbers that will be more likely to pick up a random call.
In other words, don’t pick up if you don’t recognise the number. If it’s an important call, they’ll leave a message.
There’s a couple of reasons.
The first is some companies just make their money selling big lists of active phone numbers for other ad companies to call. Numbers people answer are worth more money, and selling a list with a lot of “duds” won’t help their reputation. So they call every number and keep the ones that answer on the “definitely sell these” list.
The second is a side effect of capitalism. Every second people in call centers spend not on a call is considered waste. The company doesn’t want them twiddling their thumbs after a call waiting to find the next number in the list that picks up. So if there’s 10 operators, after one’s been on a call for a certain amount of time the robo-caller starts dialing numbers. If someone picks up but none of the operators get done, whatever, the person that was called gets no audio and hangs up. That number goes on a list to wait a while before calling again. Eventually one of the operators is done with calls around the same time someone picks up. The person who picked up might hear a second or two of silence, then suddenly the operator starts speaking. Now the company’s happy that less time was wasted.
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