It really annoys me that there isn’t a way of filtering calls based on country. 99% of my junk calls come from Australian numbers, so if I could just block Australia...
Do spam callers really think I'm expecting a call from the same area code, same exchange as my own number? Do most people have friends that have phone numbers with the same first six digits in common with their own?
I feel like this trick can't possibly work on anyone who has already seen it twice, and just based on the number of times I've seen it, I have to assume everyone has seen it at least five times by now, either that or they aren't even paying attention to caller ID at all.
All of the weirdness and strange patterns and methods you see in practice by these actors make perfect sense when you realize their targets are seniors.
In fact, even the ability to keep someone on the phone past the first 2 seconds of recorded intro greeting makes sense if that's the only interaction with a human you get all day/week.
The lives of inactive, retired seniors in the United States - especially in small or rural towns - is tremendously bleak.
And yes, they've spent their entire life with technology wherein everyone they talked to had the same NPA+PREFIX.
> In hindsight it may have helped us work contact lists faster but it did nothing for our survey completion rates. People who were not likely to answer an out-of-state call were apparently also not likely to answer a survey, even once you got them on the phone. To us, that trade-off was still worth it, because we were usually contracted to try each contact on our list either 3-5 times or until we reached a person who (completed or) declined the survey or asked you to stop calling.
> If you didn't want the calls, then we straight did not want you to continue getting them.
Don't chase leads that won't pay off. Do as little extra work as you can, to increase the likelihood of learning when a lead is known bad, so you can stop wasting effort there.
In the US, outside of the dense metro areas, this is a much more common than you think. For non-metro areas, it is quite common for everyone in the area (business and personal) with which you might receive a call has a number in the same exchange as your number.
But it is doubtful the spammers are considering that fact. It is much more likely they simply did A/B testing and saw a measurable increase in answer rate if the transmitted caller ID matched area code and exchange of the number they were dialing. And so they simply started using this trick, because their testing showed it worked.
And I worked for a call center company once, which employed a similar technique. Not down to the exchange, but by area code. We ran the numbers and found that we were much more likely to reach a person if we called through a number that belonged to their own area code, people don't pick up for out-of-state callers.
We were calling for customer satisfaction surveys, on behalf of companies they had done some business with – and almost always with a presence in their local area. So it wasn't technically a deception, unless you think that area codes should reliably represent the caller's location, in which case you'd be fighting a losing battle to be sure...
In hindsight it may have helped us work contact lists faster but it did nothing for our survey completion rates. People who were not likely to answer an out-of-state call were apparently also not likely to answer a survey, even once you got them on the phone. To us, that trade-off was still worth it, because we were usually contracted to try each contact on our list either 3-5 times or until we reached a person who (completed or) declined the survey or asked you to stop calling.
If you didn't want the calls, then we straight did not want you to continue getting them. Another rule we had was, it should not be possible for the person's phone to ring, and when they pick up it's just dead air. That means no predictive autodialers. (And of course that was the first rule to change when the company was sold, barf.)
We also ran the numbers on each area code and did a little cost-benefit deciding whether to buy those numbers or not, based on how many times we'd use them. If we didn't own a local number, we didn't use one. And we made sure that if anyone called back, the first thing they reached was a robot with a single digit to push to be added to Do Not Call list.
Turns out if you make it easy for people to get the calls to stop, you get a lot less angry people calling the reception and less angry voicemail messages, which makes for better call center employee experiences and better outcomes all-around. (I guess another strategy is to just spoof Caller ID with a number you don't own, so they can never call you back, and run the predictive rates so high that you never actually talk to an employee either. Totally unethical and it has to stop!)
The number of calls I receive which immediately hang up seconds after I pick up is absolutely ridiculous. I just imagine this call center full of people with auto-dialers going on full-speed across the room, nobody is wearing a headset and nobody is at their desk, but everyone is just sitting around a cash bonfire telling stories and laughing...
And at work, all company phones are on the same first digits.