spam calls

[darkoshi]

Even if these spam calls are intended for nothing other than to find out when I'm likely to answer the phone, what is the point of them, if when I pick up, there is no response and no message, only dead silence followed by beep beep beep, disconnect?

All that does is to further condition me to never ever EVER answer the phone if it's not a number I recognize.

Or are they really dialing random numbers trying to find fax machines, because sending fax spam is still somehow a lucrative activity for someone?

Comments

[siderea]

Or somebody's wardialer is malfunctioning/misconfigured.

I analyze my wildcard spam folder's collection, and one thing I'm amused to note is that there are clearly some spammers who haven't quite got their spam-sending applications under control, e.g. "Subject: %%SUBJECT%%" and email harvesters who haven't figured out quite how to harvest email addresses. I regularly get spam to permuted versions of my usernames, such as "sidere" and "sidereaaaa".

I take from this that not everyone up to nefarious advertising purposes is necessarily competent at it.

Fax spam is still a thing, but I don't think anybody is wardialing to find fax numbers. Most of the fax spam I get is targeted at my business either just as a small business or very specifically as a medical business - so they got my number from some source that identified it as what it is.