I’ve been getting a lot of spam phone calls lately. And I noticed that have a new trick.
My phone rings. I pick it up and say “Hello”. The spammer immediately says “Hello” back to me but then she doesn’t say anything else. (All of these calls have had women working the lines.)
If I say “Hello” a second time, she will launch into her sales pitch. But as I’ve learned the pattern, I just hang up instead.
So what’s the purpose of this? It seems like it’s just making it easier for me to spot spam calls and end them. Why don’t they follow the old pattern and start the sales pitch as soon as I pick up the phone or as soon as I say the first “Hello”? Is there some supposed psychological effect here?
I considered this might be the case. But why does it wait for me to say a second hello before transferring in the live spammer? Why not start the sales pitch on my first hello? (And I have tested it. If I don’t say the second hello, the line stays dead.)
I don’t know but I have my own oddity to report. I had been getting daily spam calls on my answering machine for I dunno years. On a whim, I answered one when I was home last week. I gave non-committal and somewhat illogical replies, which in retrospect sounded a lot like a robokiller chat bot. The subcontinental Indian lady introduced herself as from CVS, then hung up after about 20 seconds of conversation. The spam calls then stopped. Huh.
Maybe the scammers are actively adapting to automated anti-spam response bots. Or maybe it’s a coincidence and the spam calls will resume soon.
I had 4 spam calls from 3 different numbers over the weekend that left the same half-message: “Call back at this number. Thank you for your purchase.” None of the numbers showed up in a search and I didn’t get a purchase alert on any of my cards. Probably a phishing scam of some sort.
I miss the old days. I have lots of cool retro rotary-dial hardwired phones in my house. I used to get real calls. Loved to talk on those phones.
Now I never answer the phone. Damn spammers ruined my simple pleasure.
When I do answer, I get the spammers that make no sense: they never talk to me. Just silence. What the hell kind of scam is that? I feel like yelling into the phone: “I’m stupid! Take my money!” But they never answer.
Watching old TV shows, we crack up at “the wronged wife” character, who is convinced that her husband is cheating. Her evidence: callers that never say anything when she answers the phone. “Who does that?”, she accuses. I laugh. Welcome to the 21st century!
I’m hoping you really do understand what’s going on here. It’s very simple. There are two things going on.
They are trying to learn which numbers get answered and which don’t. The ones that get answered are more valuable than the ones that are not. You are seeding your own crop of future spam calls by answering. You may as well stand outside in your lawn blowing the fluffy tops off dandelions you’ve collected from around the neighborhood.
As one of their first level human agents is wrapping up their current call, the robo-caller makes a couple hundred phone calls to a couple hundred victim numbers. Of which you are one. The robo-caller can’t predict to the second which call(s) will get answered nor when. But whichever one is answered just as the agent becomes available is routed to them, and the other calls are hung up on, or are lft with silence for a few seconds, then hung up on. That maximizes the productivity of the human agent. Who, even at $2/day in Bangladesh or wherever, is far more expensive than the 200 zero-cost calls they made for each one the agent actually talked to.
The computer logic gets more complicated when they have a group (or an army) of human agents. But the concept remains: have a fresh victim ready and waiting the instant a human agent becomes available to talk to them. All of this is an artifact of modern internet phone calls being free. If calls cost $1 each to place, answered or not, there would be almost no phone spam.
I hope you understand that answering or not answering makes no damn difference in future calls. Or my answering machine is considered “answering”. Because I’ve been seeing this for twenty years, and nothing is changing, except that I get spam calls on my cell that I didn’t used to, that I never answer.
And that the economics of volume calls vs human agent make no sense when I never get a person on the other end. Never!
I’ve gotten these before, and before I get the phone to my ear I already heard the bot ask “hello?”.
They are saying this to get you to instinctually reply with “hello” if you haven’t already. I think it’s to verify that they called a direct line and not a directory/prompt number like a doctor’s office etc…
The last time I got one of these, I heard the bot “hello?” and I didn’t say anything. It hung up after a few seconds.
I wish there was an option to charge the other person for the phone call they made to you. Just a token amount like $0.50. If you wanted to charge them you could, if you didn’t you didn’t have to. The money could go into a fund to stop telemarketing scams and the person reporting it wouldn’t benefit.
It seems like that would allow free phone calls between people but cut down on spam.
Yeah, I figure those ones are aimed at people who do a lot of online shopping, and so may have lost track of one or more purchases. They’re hoping you’ll go, “Oh, it must be the glowing fish lamp! I was wondering why it hadn’t arrived!”, and so they get a hook into you.