I have read that article. However, from my experience, that is not accurate and does not reflect the current market.
I know that crude parsing can be done by computers. (Heck, I was working with a predecessor of that in the 1980s.) Computers are cheaper than employees pushing buttons. From this and personal experiments, I doubt if many humans are in the loop, at least until the end where the pitch is converted to a credit card charge. And even that can be highly automated.
This is just my WAG from many years of experience and a hobby of robocall honey-pots and analysis.
This site includes a link where you can enter any area code and see what the average robocalls are. Don’t know how accurate this data is, but it’s interesting.
(Since that’s a news site, that URL might become obsolete quickly.) Some quotes:
I think that is way low. There’s no question that 98% of the calls I get are scams or at least highly annoying, from the fake tech support to the fake free cruises to political ads. I get less than 2 genuine, wanted robocalls per month, from the VA – reminding me to get a flu shot or about an appointment – and rarely, from my bank or credit card about a security issue.
The genuine ones leave a message, the others, mostly, do not.
Recent calls show that the neighbor spoofing is even more specific. In the last week, I have received robocalls from supposedly numbers just a few digits different from mine, and some of them have the correct name for that number, so there’s some clever database lookup being done here.
In my experience, whether you are legal or not, the list is meaningless. If you have an established business relationship, you don’t have to respect the list. Likewise, all political and charity calls are exempt. There’s a de facto exemption for any caller that can claim to be political or a charity or have a business relationship with you, since no one polices this.
The most recent version of this is creating a phone number with a different area code & prefix than mine, but the same last 4 digits, with the right-most one replaced with “4”. While this could be a coincidence, a random chance, it’s certainly not when I get one every day using this pattern, but with a different set of first numbers.
Frequently the created number is an inactive number, but not always, so this is not a hard rule.
All of my phone numbers end with zero. When I spot the same last four digits, with the very last one changed to “4”, I know it’s from the same spam caller even without looking at the other digits.
Huh - I hadn’t noticed this one - I’ll keep an eye out for it.
I get a lot with the same area code and exchange - I know not to answer those.
Yesterday, I got a live person call: “Hi - calling back; I missed a call from your number”. I had not called that number, so I suspect someone is using my number as part of their spoofing pattern now.
I never answer calls anymore unless it’s someone I know or someone I’m expecting a call from. If it’s “Unknown name” or “Private number” or a business I haven’t heard of or can’t think of a reason to be calling me, I ignore it, and they can leave me a message if they’re a real person who wants to talk to me.
I haven’t spoken to a telemarketer, robocall, or collection agency since 2003.
I think we’re on a bit of a delay here. We just got to the “use your own phone number” trick now. My parents were all excited telling me about it, and how they knew it wasn’t really from our house, since the Caller ID doesn’t show if you make a one-party call.