An alternative I thought of the other day while watching one of the hundreds of YouTube videos of this was to simply batch-dial thousands of numbers all at once

An alternative I thought of the other day while watching one of the hundreds of YouTube videos of this was to simply batch-dial thousands of numbers all at once then randomly route them to each other. For bonus points, record everything and make it available live. The next level up would be a trusted-user system where you could go to a website, hit a button and immediately be connected with an actual scammer; or you could listen in on other people currently in calls and suggest things they should do next. And maybe there could be a pool of VMs available to play with... Regardless of technique - fake recordings or various types of routing - I would advise making friends with all the high-level VoIP gateways. That way you won't have any problems batch-establishing hundreds of calls at once (for example if you know all the numbers for a call center and you know what time the, er, staff get in), getting a new number block, or even getting general caller ID override (which I understand is sometimes unavailable?). My thinking here is that if you can win over a bunch of providers (with money and inspiration/sentiment), you could VoIP-DDoS the gateway providers the scammers are using. Would tie up the scammers' time moving to a new VoIP provider.