It seems like an old flea market where most people don't buy anything but the vendors all buy and sell old stuff from each other to supplement.

I keep all my interviewing data isolated from my private data.

It made me wonder whether reverse 911[1] calls, which are used to warn about hazmat situations, fire evacuations, and other public safety issues, show up similarly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_9-1-1

There are too many nuisance calls, there are too many people (and businesses) falling for scams, and there seems to be nothing telcos or governments are willing to do about it.

It's pretty much the same thing that's happened to Usenet and Email (and is now happening to the Web as well). John Gilmore's lament about crackdowns on open email relays is heartfelt, but ultimately naive. If I'm remembering correctly (and I'm probably not), it ran something like: We created a way for anyone anywhere in the world to talk to anyone else, and it wasn't an accident. The problem is of course, bad actors, and lowering costs means enabling vastly more bad actors.

Figuring out how to impose highly asymmetric costs --- and not necessarily financial ones --- on unwanted communication attempts, will win this.

The technical problem is reasonably straightforward. Generating widespread adoption is the real challenge, IMO.

- The US remains relatively high income / high wealth. Especially among the more vulnerable senior population.

- The regulatory environment in the US hasn't been successful, or much interested from appearances, in taking on spam.

- Uniform language. Virtually the entire country speaks a single language, English. That's roughly 300 million targets (minor children generally wouldn't count). The largest single European nationality would be Germany, with a total population of 84 million. It's not even possible to necessarily presume an entire country speaks one language, as with Switzerland. And though computer-generated calls are increasing in prevalence, most still use human speakers.

Effectively, it's opportunity, mechanism, and logistics.

But as costs fall and voice-processing (both comprehension and realtime generation) improve, I'd suggest increasing your vigilence around telephone hygiene.

I have, in fact, gotten periodic spam calls, though only once or twice an SMS - usually trying to solicit me about my car's insurance policy having issues (I do not own a car).

I sort of wish I could convince my Android phone to treat all calls to my direct number from anyone but GV as spam, because I have never given that number to anyone.

Monetary or social costs were both asymmetrically in favor of the receiver because a long-distance call was expensive and a local spam call would eventually incur a high social cost (either in the innocent case of teenage prank calls being figured out by parents or the less innocent cases where the police or phone company might need to trace the source).

I also wonder EU countries, including Sweden, would actually allow telecom providers to share that information with other parties such as emergency services or whether that would be against data protection laws.

Besides, prior to the pandemic, there was also a high likelihood that I wouldn't be at home, if you called me on a random day at a random time, so even if my phone were tied to my address, it wouldn't be a good idea for emergency services to rely on that.

If they leave a voicemail, I'll get a transcript.

This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven't been particularly careful about where I use the number, which is probably how it got this bad.

Even when you consider most calls now for SIP/VoIP platforms (which is where a lot of these scammers get their DID/phone numbers from) are charging fractions of a cent for outbound calls, enumerating and then dialing entire NPA spaces gets prohibitively expensive after even five minutes of dialing waiting for someone to pick up, even for the most dedicated of scam call centers.

Doesn't mean they aren't dialing randomly to see who picks up, just I doubt they're dialing entire phone number spaces wholesale.

What can be observed going on is these scammers quite literally trade lists of leaked phone numbers and email addresses and they actively keep track of who responds, and who falls for their scam before sharing the list with others.

Jim Browning (a popular youtube scambaiter and infosec pro) has videos where you can watch it happening with your own eyes.

That was the reason: to understand where my data was leaking from, not to duck recruiter calls.

One time the guy told me that the person who referred me "preferred to remain anonymous".

I asked him if he realised that this is a violation of GDPR and that a typical candidate would recognize it as such?

No coherent answer.

Kinda makes me regret the few years my LinkedIn profile had my phone number public, but I do wonder how successful these questionable personal data marketplaces are. I certainly haven't had a conversation get beyond "this is spam".

Interesting resource nonetheless that supplements my day-to-day line of Devsecops.

This site and a few other OSINT tools was how I discovered who 'sold out' my CV to some of the questionable 'recruiting agencies'.