Posting about the status of numbers

Scams
1

Without naming names, there’s a horrible trend of people posting simply that a number is “down” or “not working”. Any post is going to get bumped down on the homepage enough on its own if a number ceases to work. If you do feel the need to post that a number isn’t working, please give more details.

"Called at *time*, said phone number was no longer in service." or whatever happened. You need to understand that scammers can simply stop answering or in the case of actual call centers, temporarily disconnect the phone number whenever they choose. You can be posting that a number is down only for it to be working again 2 minutes later.

Just be more mindful and don't derail a thread just because it didn't work for you.

2

Yep. Also even with dialers/flooders, sometimes a number is not truily “down”.

VOIP doesn't work like a landline or a cell phone where you have no choice between inbound/outbound calls... with VOIP you do. Some scammers will "protect" some of their agents by disabling their inbound call flow but their outbound dialer will continue unimpeded.

Suppose you have a scammer call center with agents working on shift like this:

Inbound/callback team:
[Ajit] [Raj] [Gupta] [Gopal] [Rajesh] [Viji] [Saanvi] [Pari] [Anika] [Romesh]

Then you have your dialer team taking live transfers from the predictive dialer (outbound team):
[Haji] [Ramek]

The dialer team is far less productive because nearly zero people press any buttons on those robot "you are going to jail" prompts, they roll into voicemail.

After they're being hit by scambaiters, the Indian running the call flow will do this:

Inbound/callback team:
[Ajit]

Outbound team:
[Haji] [Ramek] [Raj] [Gupta] [Gopal] [Rajesh] [Viji] [Saanvi] [Pari] [Anika] [Romesh] [Raj]

He will leave Ajit by himself to monitor the choas happening on the inbound side and the dialer guy will sit there waiting for an "all clear!" signal to come from Ajit to move Raj's teammates back to inbound.

This is why when I send a shitstorm of goats, hungry cats, ISIS fighters and other paraphernalia to a scammer's number and it hasn't been answering for 15 minutes I will slow down the dialing rate a lot, and then I start to hear Ajit testing the line--because he thinks legit calls might be coming through again.

It's often way more fun for me when they give the all-clear and move all the agents back to Inbound... then I go right back to calling at the original speed and start hearing loads more Conference Join chimes.

This is why we go back and hit HER's numbers routinely even if they're dead---numbers can come back up and they often do.

Even if a center is not "completely" knocked out by this action is might as well be. Victims are more likely to reach an outbound scammer by returning the call rather than responding to the robot discombobulated voice and mashing buttons. And you still have a bunch of agents with nothing to do but play minesweeper or catch up on Bollywood DVD rips even though a few of the agents are still working.

This is also why you shouldn't ignore numbers that go down on you--they often pop back up within minutes to hours or the next day. Most of us go back and randomly spot-check numbers we were hitting the previous day to see if they're taking calls again, so you'll see repeats here. If you read through an ADAROSS or BOBROSS thread for the whole day you'll see the same numbers pop up again because the scammer put out another popup ad campaign.

My suggestion: Install some tricks on your computer to speed up manual dialing... whether it by AutoHotKey or whatever tool you think works so that you can rapidly enter in numbers to dial. You can train automation tools like AutoHotKey to click windows or buttons, I'm told... so you could also invest in "replacing" some of the keys you might not use on your number pad (I replaced the / on my number pad to print # instead, and the - key to terminate a call)