Experimenting with SPAM callers - 17 June 2025

We have a landline.  We have it for A Reason, so do not shame me.  We have had it for 30 years with the same number.   We get buckets of SPAM calls on the landline and have for years.  We originally subscribed to Caller ID so that we could know when a "real" person is calling, but that has its limits.  Most of the time, we have ignored the calls and let them rollover to the voicemail recorder.  Over the last two to three years, the SPAM calls stepped up and we now get one or two per hour.  This is annoying.  I have noticed that a lot of them are silent calls - no evident caller, just silence. As an experiment, I recently I started to answer these calls.  Many are still silent and hang up after 10-15 seconds, but some are actual callers: still SPAM, but a real person calling on the line.  I ask these people to remove me from their list and tell them we are on the Washington state do-not-call registry, but that does not seem to affect them; they usually just hang up and I am only hoping that they stop calling.  This practice has done little to reduce the SPAM calling rates.  I have even tried calling back the numbers on the Caller ID, but that usually goes nowhere and I believe the Caller ID info from spammers is pretty thoroughly spoofed.

So I started a new experiment this week:  I answer the calls but say nothing.  Ideally, I would mute my end, but that is buried in some menu and I am too lazy to find it, so I just listen.  No response from me, just silence.  Our house is quiet enough that it really is silent.  My theory is that the calling system will hear the silence and conclude that ours is a dead number (e.g., that they have discovered another outbound-calls-only spammer).  I hope this encourages them to start removing our number from the spammer lists.  We shall see.

If there is an actual caller that comes on the line, I will ask some key questions - who are they calling, who are they, and so on.  This usually reveals some business just rolling through the (proverbial) phone book looking for business - calls from realtors who want to flip the house, from builders who want to do some remodeling, or some other damn thing.  I have just been asking for them to remove us from their call lists, but I am now going to try to collect enough informationt that I will be able to identify them.  I have not decided what I will do with this information (report them to the WA Attorney General, name-and-shame them on social media, perhaps something else).  We shall see.

Photo: Gargoyle, Hospices de Beaune, France, 2025.