> Under the theory that the economics of scam-spam calls only work out if good victims self select by not hanging up I have long considered it a civic duty to w

> Under the theory that the economics of scam-spam calls only work out if good victims self select by not hanging up I have long considered it a civic duty to waste the scammers time. I used to immediately hang up upon receiving these spam/scam calls, but they kept coming, and I decided to do this approach. I once got a spam call from a "credit card rate reduction" scam and I was so pissed at being interrupted so I decided to play along. I gave them a fake credit card number (that checksums right with the Luhn algorithm, there's a website that generates such fake "credit card numbers"), fake expiration date, fake zipcode, fake SSN, and fake name. Of course, they were unable to charge that "card", so the first-level scammer escalated me to his boss (not kidding). The boss asked for my bank's customer service number -- I imagine so they could pretend to be me and try to finesse the bank into letting the transaction happen. I gave them some random police department dispatch phone number, and she places me on hold. She comes back on the line, literally incandescent with rage after she called the number, and she screamed at me "I talked with the police department, they gave me your address, see you soon, bye bye" and hung up. That caused the number of spam/scam calls i receive to go down noticeably. These people don't respect any sort of do-not-call lists but I think they may place you on internal do-not-call lists if you waste their time and infuriate them enough. Couple months later, I got another “interest rate reduction” scam-call, and the guy doesn't waste time with the social-engineering; he straight-up opens by asking me for my credit card number and expiration. I decide to meet fire with fire, and I ask “what name do you show on the account”, he replies “it’s your name”. I pointedly ask “can you read it out for me” so he yells at me: “don’t waste my fucking time, you mother fuck” and hangs up. After I did so, I barely get any spam/scam calls at all -- maybe once every two weeks. It's pretty incredible how a little trolling saved me so much annoyance. Reminder; never give any personal information to people calling about your credit-card/bank-account no matter who they claim they are. Always HANG UP and dial the number as printed on your payment card, these scamming shits always spoof caller-ID.