I answer the phone not with “Hello”, but with “This is Carnivorous”. I receive many calls on my work phone, get no response for several seconds, so I hang up. I discussed this with Mrs. Plant; does a device wait to hear “Hello” and then start the recorded spam call?
Surely enough, I answered a call today, “This is Carnivorous.” Nothing for five seconds. I tried, “Hello”, and almost immediately heard, “Hi, this is Stan…” and hung up.
I would be interested to know how often answering with your name vs. hello results in hearing less spam.
I answer my work phone by saying my department then my name. If met by silence, I follow up with the name of the government agency I work for. So far, no spammer has remained on the line after that.
STIR/SHAKEN has curtailed virtually all spam calls to our home number. We weren’t getting all that many calls, anyway, after I got one group of “Windows” workers to hang up.
I do a similar thing, there was a script we followed answering official phones when I was in the Navy, and spam callers are reluctant to move foreward if I say “USS Maine engine room, Petty Officer Encyclopedia speaking, how may I help you sir, ma’am or chief?”
If you answer calls from unknown/out-of-state numbers with “Federal Trade Commission, Fraud Division. How may I help you?” it might just lower your spam call frequency.
What are spam calls? 
Seriously, if I receive a call on my personal cell, and I don’t recognize the number, I let it go to voicemail. If they don’t leave voicemail, I ignore it. If they leave voicemail, and it’s spam, I delete the message and block the number.
If I receive a call on my work number, and I don’t recognize the number, I let it go to voicemail. If they don’t leave voicemail, I ignore it. If they leave voicemail, and it’s spam, I delete the message and block the number.
I answer with, “City jail, Turnkey speaking. Which prisoner do you want to speak to?”
I made the mistake of telling a telemarketer to stop calling me when I got a live person instead of a recording about 5 years ago and then the telemarketer proceeded to ring my phone from 10 different phone numbers for the next hour just to fuck with me.
I’d be reluctant to answer with my name as it’s a piece of personal information they may not already know (if it’s an autodialler for example) - it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they would pay someone to skim the recordings and make a note of your name for more targeted spamming later.
I might start answering unknown calls with ‘Ahoy ahoy!’ instead of ‘hello’ though.
My question exactly. Who, in today’s ad-and-saleshole-infested world, is actually answering the phone? I haven’t answered any unverified phone call in many years.
I could understand a contractor or small business owner answering unknown numbers, due to potential customers. But the rest of us? At home? I’m really surprised at this.
Next y’all will tell me you answer unknown callers at your front door too.
I answer all the time. I still get very few calls. I did go through a 3 week period when my (non-existant) car got very popular with the warranty folk. Still only 2-3 calls a day. Then an abrupt cut-off.
On very rare occasions I get phone calls from field engineers working in a plant somewhere that need my help, so I have to answer the phone.
If it’s a spam caller I push whatever buttons I need to push until I can talk to a human, and then I try to be as verbally abusive as possible. It seems to work. I get a lot fewer spam calls than everyone else I know.
Same here. I never pick up unknown numbers.
I am not sure how true this is, but my understanding is that these auto-spam systems capture when someone answers, and even if you hang up a few seconds later, the system now knows there is a real person at that number, and the spammer can sell that number to other spammers as a good lead.
I’ve posted it on other ‘scam call’ threads, and I’ll post it again:
I think it’s a very genial gesture to try to address people in their native tongue, and while it may be just a touch racist to generalize so … IME … most of these calls are coming from India.
I’m not so arrogant as to say I “really took that car dealership to the cleaners” by negotiating a screamingly low price on my new car. Similarly, I don’t ‘ruin the day’ of these scammers, but …
The reactions they give really can be priceless. It seems to get their goat, if only for a moment.
I usually answer unknown callers on my cell because I’m a contact for a social club and my number is on our website.
Sometimes I say “Speak”, other times in Spanish or Russian. If no one responds in 10 seconds I disconnect and block the number. If it was a legit call, I explain and we laugh.
I do, In the past 6 years I have had an average of one medical appointment per week [cancer and treatment are bitches] and especially over the past 2 years I get pre appointment screening calls and post appointment various calls that the staffers were doing from their homes by blocking their numbers [they loved being able to do the calls from home, distancing was good =)] so I can’t be certain a blocked call or unfamiliar number is spam. I recycle mrAru’s Navy outgoing answering message from when he was at RadCon/NSSF which gets a tentative ‘Is Aruvqan there?’ and it is perfectly normal to screen by asking who is calling =) If they make it past the screening by telling me they are X from X’s office, then I ID myself =)
I usually don’t say anything, and the call hangs up after a few seconds. I figure a real person would say something.
That’s for my cell. My landline never gets answered unless I see a number I know on caller id.
For Indian calls, when they say “This is Joe” in a heavy Indian accent, I respond by saying something like “Hi, Partha.” I know lots of real Indian names. But the Windows morons never call or never get through. It’s all car stuff now.
Interesting. We reset our voicemail answer to be the electronic non-personalized one, and we get a lot less also.
I don’t get many spam calls, but when I do I’ve noticed there is often a long pause anyway while the person on the other end takes over from the robocaller. I would think the pause you are hearing is that, and the timing of your “hello” was coincidental. It would seem to be a bit silly to filter out your spam to only a subset of responders who say a magic word.
The pause is partly because the system dials numbers in bulk then hands them off automatically to individuals in the call centre as they become available. This is also why sometimes there’s just silence and then it disconnects - the system has to assume the level of calls that can be handled by the call centre - if there are no available agents at the time you pick up the call, their system will wait a moment, then hang up.
Those are just poor guys trying to make a living. They don’t know it’s a racket. It doesn’t bother the assholes running things a bit to mess with the guys operating the phones.