There aren’t any tricks like that that will work. It’s a bunch of computers that call a big list of numbers sequentially. They don’t “think” anything no matter what you do and you can’t trick them. Even if you talk to someone, it’s an AI bot at first.
An unused extension would never be answered; it’d ring forever. The person who gave you that advice knows nothing of telephony, much less of 2026-era scamistry.
In the olden times when spam calls were made by a real person, this may have worked. A local company selling carpet cleaning by having call center employees call numbers in the local region would want to make sure they had an optimized list of numbers to call. They would trim numbers from the list if they were invalid because they wouldn’t want the employees wasting time calling those numbers. But that’s not the case today. Spammers around the world use computers to call every possible number. There is no list that they keep. It is virtually free to make unlimited calls over VOIP, so they blast out as many calls as they can. And even if one spammer does take you off their list, there are infinite other spammers who will be trying to call your number.
Unless the phone was programed to go to voicemail after so many rings. The voicemail would have no greeting/message as it wasn’t assigned to anybody.
My suspected scam callers almost never leave a message, so voicemail stays pristine.
Must be a different class of scammers, too busy to bother leaving tainted breadcrumbs.
You are looking for a phone that has a feature called “smart call blocker” by AT&T. It answers the phone for you, “This phone is being monitored by smart call blocker. Please say your name and press the pound key to be connected.” The robots never hear it while humans do. People that call you often, like friends and family, can be saved in the directory and bypass the screener. It blocks about 99% of my spam calls. It has a built in voicemail, so any phone service provided one will no longer work, since it answers the phone. Best investment I ever made. By the set that has multiple phones to replace all your phones.
Yes, if you send me $100…