I don’t understand this forums obsession with number flooding. That doesn’t do shit. It’s a minor inconvenience to the scammers as they use cheap phone and voip services like textnow.
The moment a fresh number is found and posted on here, that number almost always gets some 16-year-old blowing up the phone like 20 times, the number goes dead and a new one needs to be found all over again.
If you actually want to stop scammers from scamming people, number flooding isn’t the way to go.
i dont understand your take because if we are causing them to change numbers then we ARE stopping them. if they have to keep changing numbers then they cant focus on scamming
A vast majority of them use textnow, the process of changing a textnow number is like… 5 minutes, tops.
It’s not like the moment they change the number it’ll get flagged again. Wasting a large amount of time is how you actually affect these scam-companies.
yes but with a fresh textnow number they have to ADVERTISE it to get people to call. its not like people know the new number right away right? so they advertise the new number, we bomb it and they start all over again
Yes, start all over again. Then, the chance of that particular operation getting flagged, then finding it’s way on scammer.info is very slim; considering this site has a max of 25 people during peak hours.
actually its not that slim as most scammers are dumb and use the same phone number over and over and just change the suffix number so they are easy to fish. for example, Synergy Finance scammers use the same 917 730 xxxx when making a new number
And if they are changing VOIP numbers, they must pay for a new VOIP.
Also, it is my understanding that if they have a toll free VOIP, every minute they are using it before needing to get a new VOIP number they must pay per minute a cost on the toll free number they were using before needing to get a new VOIP number.
BEFORE they decide to get a new VOIP number, while they are getting slammed with calls they start answering the phone with only an angry OR a very wary/skittish “Hello” that could SPOOK an innocent caller who might fall prey to their scam.
As far as TextNow numbers, they can get a new one easily just like WE can get a new TextNow number easily.
TextNow numbers are often used by scammers to call back people who called their VOIP numbers and got the message machine. Sometimes a lone scammer might be using only a TextNow number to scam, but in my experience usually scammers use TextNow numbers to call back people even though the scammers are in a Call Center with a VOIP number.
Personally I am not angry or offended at this thread you created, @PikaPikaGamer. I am bein’ sincere. Thanks for bringing it up with this thread. It never hurts to examine things and throw ideas around with each other.
I am not sure what you mean by “flooding” as you could mean code that runs and automatically robo-dials a phone number hundreds of times per minute or you could mean people that dial manually and repeatedly a phone number to harass criminals without trying to bait them.
There have been civil debates on this site about baiting versus harassing, and at least in some cases the debates were about manual harassment and not using code to robo dial and flood their phone number. This is not a new discussion. In a chat room of another site there has been the same discussions.
Here is a link to a different thread in this very site and you can click on the link to read the FULL thread:
One could argue that people who want to BAIT criminals are not going to want call flooding that is robo-dialing OR that is people manually calling repeatedly to harass the criminals.
It was not recently but I spoke with a user in a different website on the phone in the Mosh Pit and he is a GREAT scam baiter, both using a virtual machine when applicable and just verbally baiting them and stringing them along when a virtual machine is not applicable. I think this was last year or maybe even in 2020. He said it does make baiting harder but he said in his opinion it just helps a scam baiter improve and perfect his or her baiting.
Other scam baiters of course might disagree and wish that nobody harasses scammers manually and repeatedly OR by flooding their number with automated robo dialing. It can be harder to bait, with or without a virtual machine depending on the scam, if code is robo dialing/flooding a number OR if people are manually and repeatedly calling just to harass the criminals.
I suspect that there are reasonable arguments for and against to be honest with you.
As others have pointed out, there is more for the scammers to have to deal with than simply changing a number. Let’s say, for example, that a scammer wants to run a PayPal scam. Somebody will have to set up a spam email campaign or a robocaller, which takes time and money. Usually the scammers themselves don’t set up the popup but rather buy the calls off of somebody else so that creates a bunch of issues there. If a number gets flooded and taken down then all the effort spent on creating that popup campaign is wasted and hopefully it causes some friction between the scammer and the call provider.
Another example of call flooding in action is that there are very few scams that exist any more with a public website and a toll free number. Try calling America Geeks, for example. Oh wait, you can’t. That scam got harassed out of existence. Try calling Yippee Tech, GuruAid or 24/7 techies. One that got smashed on here quite recently was Sapphire Softech Solutions. I know for a fact that those guys got hit with a massive flood of calls and they simply gave up and took down their number.
That doesn’t make the scammers go away entirely. There are other ways of finding scam victims, but it makes it harder for them to do business and reduces the number of victims that they are able to scam.
If you meant that to me, then yes, I did read your whole post, but I don’t understand the title, followed by your first sentence of “Hot take? Maybe, don’t really care though.” This seems contradictive to me, so I figured it must bother you for you to put that title. Sorry if I offended you, but that title does beg to be commented on and so I did. It is not really a ‘hot take’ at all since call flooding has been around for many years, but seems more like an emotional attention grabber as an opinion.
VOIP toll free numbers get charged to the owner per minute per call. If the scammers get hit with a heavy duty call flooder that can spit out a couple of hundred calls simultaneously then the bill for that can rack up really quickly.
I am not a purist when it comes to this sort of thing. If someone has the software and the technical skill to make hundreds of calls at once, good luck to them. If someone has the software and skills to make one single phone call at a time and waste a scammer’s time, good luck to them. If at the end of the day one senior citizen did not go to Target and get a gift card (or let a criminal into their computer using Anydesk), a good deed has been done.
