All of a sudden, out of the blue, I am getting 7 or 8 spam cell phone calls a day. All of them are an Atlanta phone number (770). I lived in the metro Atlanta until about a month ago and now I live in SC. This suddenly started about 2 weeks ago since I moved from ATL. On a couple of occasions, I have answered the phone out of curiosoity and there is nothing on the other end except 20 seconds of complete silence. Occasionally the caller leaves a voice mail and it is also about 2O seconds of silence.
What could they be attempting to acccomplish by this
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Autodialers make a call and listen for ring and short sections of silence before notifying the human that someone answered the phone. If it hears a long talk session it figures it is an answering machine. Otherwise, the caller is notified there is someone on the phone and they may or may not already be on a call so they never pick up. They then may initiate another call (perhaps from a different number) to try to speak with you. If their connection is from overseas (oftent he case) their audio may not work and you hear silence.
If your number was a 770, you moved and kept the 770, they have no clue what your current location is.
Then again, the 770 may just be a coincidence, such as when I get calls from Washington DC or MIchigan.
The caller may not even know who you are and is just calling random numbers.
A Big Clue is when the caller-ID number does not match the number they tell you to call in the message.
I get pretty much the same kind of calls, but the vast majority are in my own area code. I started using call screening to answer unknown numbers. What is nice it that it generally requires them to hang up first, so they can’t fill up my voicemail with spam blank messages. If they actually say anything, I see a transcript, and can answer the call if it isn’t spam (that happened only once).
Aren’t we supposed to be wary of spam calls as far as speaking to the caller? In other words, a bad agent spam caller may capture your voice for a potential voice-simulator and try to use that to hack the voice recognition of bank accounts, etc?