Speaking of phone scams,....

[Floyd R. Turbo]

A new one I’ve experienced is the caller ID displays a local pharmacy, clinic, medical facility etc. when answered the call is actually telemarketing for everything from free trips to air duct cleaning and everything in between. We’ve received a number of these over the past month and as a result if we’re not expecting a call from one of the referenced entities we don’t answer the phone! 🤬

[CurtEastPoint]

1. I have pretty much stopped answering unless it is a friend in my contacts. Everyone else

can leave a message. So GD sick and tired of scammers.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

2. Weve turned off the answering machine to avoid the messages left by scammers.

[samnsara]

3. yep it displays a local number..then some giggly girl answers and apologizes for being

....away from the phone when you answered because she was dealing with a kid or hubby. she sounds real!! Finally i asked her if she was a robot and when she didnt talk back to me i called her a few names...no reaction. so i blocked the number.

[CurtEastPoint]

4. Whatever you do, if you get that giggle crap and she 'says' can you hear me do NOT say 'yes'

as they will record your saying it and use it to sign you up for God knows what.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/the-adjust-my-headset-scam-do-not-say-yes/

[demigoddess]

6. we get a lot of phone calls and they don't even bother to leave a message anymore

They want attention because sometimes they will leave a message that says "Goodbye" in a really sexy recorded voice. makes me laugh.

[LeftInTX]

7. Crap......I get spoofed local calls, but not pharmacies, clinics etc.

Not looking forward to this.

[Grammy23]

8. If we dont recognize the number (and more often than not we dont) we do not answer.

At first it was hard not to answer since the conventional way to handle phone calls has always been to answer a ringing phone. Since the development of caller ID we had a line of defense against calls from people we did not know and were not interested in knowing. But since the technology of spoofing a number became easily available, even Caller ID can be misleading or false.

So for us, the easiest thing to do is not answer unknown callers and let the caller leave a message if they have a reason to do so. Most of the time scammers and sales callers do not leave a message. But the ones who do are often quite entertaining. A recent one indicated there were 4 serious charges against my name (they never used my or my husband’s name) and I had 24 hours to call them back. If I didn’t the local “cops” (their words) would come arrest me. It was all done by a female sounding computer generated voice. All sounding a little threatening but definitely BS. In any case, it gave both of us quite the laugh and they had the nerve to call back again a week or so later so I blocked them. Usually, I block all callers who are clearly scammers.

[FSogol]

9. A free trip to an air duct cleaning? Did you go?

[Floyd R. Turbo]

11. It sucked! 😏

[FSogol]

12. LOL. n/t

[Leith]

10. The Ones I've Been Getting Lately

have spoofed the number to my area code and telephone exchange. The last 4 numbers, once I google them, seem to be set to unassigned numbers.

Since I don't know a single person who has my phone exchange, I know that they are spam and scams.

The one that worried me was when I got a phone call from the area code where my family lives 2,000 miles away. I answered it thinking that it could be my niece calling to tell me of an emergency (I don't have her number memorized). If it hadn't been a recording, I would have cussed them out.

The scam call that pisses me off the most is the local Big Brothers. It is invariably a woman with an accent so thick that I can't understand her and she won't stop talking. I blocked the number, but last week, they tried calling SEVEN times in 2 minutes. If they do it again, I will go down there and tell them in person what I think of them.