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Has anyone ever done a study on the profitability of spam calls?

E.g., what’s the average return per phone call when the scammers phone me to let me know that my business isn’t being “properly listed” on google and bing. All I need is to give them my cc info and they’ll fix it for me.

I get that one nonstop.



Depends if it’s a robocall.

Even if it is, when I press 1 and string their human along for a minute, that’s gotta be catastrophic to their ROI.

“Don’t hang up!!!” is my advice (and the opposite of various anti-fraud groups)

Even letting the line sit open for an extra 30s until the robocaller hangs up can multiply their costs.


I do this. Often they hang up when they hear my voice, so I’ve found speaking slowly and like I was confused person but taking them seriously seems to be the sweet spot. From there, continuing to act confused and get their instructions wrong constantly keeps them on the line. If you mention the word “scam” or any implication they are criminals they hang up immediately and move on. They also don’t have patience for “not being able to hear/understand them.”

I think if I can take as much of their time as possible that’s less time they have to scam vulnerable people. And it’s often good for a lark and quick break from the day.


One of my favorites is "hold on one second i need to grab something from the oven, be right back!" then mute the phone and forget about it.


It doesn't have hard numbers but it does discuss how to analyze mass spamming strategies. I found it very eye opening.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

"False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing."




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