I've been doing scambaiting for only the last couple of months. I'm an old programmer who has worked around large systems for a long time, and on a few projects I've worked on phone systems. I figured I'd give some advice and boost your spirits.
Most of you who are also new to this will discover that on the weekends--when you have the most free time--it seems like it's much harder to find working numbers. There's several reasons for this:
There are a LOT more scambaiters who have free time on weekends than they have on weekdays
Some scammers who impersonate government agencies and corporations limit their hours to business hours. This is more true for IRS/SSA than it is for Tech Support. There are some 24-hour scammers out there, but as it turns out two of them have made legal threats against this website. Despite that there's still IRS/SSA scammers who popup on weekends and Federal holidays because a dollar is still worth a dollar if you can get it.
A scammer that does multiple types of scams (many do this) will switch around and go with whatever they feel makes money for them and not care what day it is. So they may give up on the long slog of tech support which only yields $400-$1,000 to spend hours trying for the bigger prize of scamming an elderly woman out of $5,000 who thinks she owes the IRS buckets.
Just remember one thing: on weekends there are far more scambaiters working the phones compared to a smaller size of active scammers. When many of us are running dry on numbers that answer it means we are winning, we're on top. That means on weekends a lot of the telecom network is relieved of the oppressive traffic scammers bring.
It's normal and okay to go through a dry spell. There's chat, writing new scripts to try out on scammers, or working on a project like a voice modifier or learning how dialers work. I like to look for new bad phone numbers that are reported (FindWhoCallsYou) and test them.
Sometimes I find crazy prosperity preachers or come across small-fry scammers that everybody missed because they're trying to not get noticed by NomoRobo and the other big call blocker/reporter tools. I try to pass those that I find on to here to Scammer.info, since it is the #1 resource for scambaiting. I don't care if 50 people pile on to a number I just posted and take it out---*that's the point*.
The goal is to get these scammers off of the telecom system and raise the cost of scamming---by wasting the scammer's time so they're limited in the amount of money they can game off the network. Without us the telecom system would already be two feet in the grave. It's got one foot in the grave already.
The telephone was a wonderful invention that brought the whole world together into one community 170 years ago. The phone system as we know it is dying, and quickly. I really only call 5 people routinely anymore. At work, everything is done with closed voice chat and most of my colleagues have switched off their direct DIDs--we no longer have telephones at our desk. The smartphone has now become an annoyance with over 50% of all calls on the telephone network are unwanted garbage. So most of us roll everything to voicemail, or we put our phones on silent and we use SMS to reach people in real time and email or social media to do routine contacts to our friends instead of the phone.
Phone users have been running away from the network because it's mostly become an unhelpful annoyance.
Just to be able to listen to music on my smartphone again I have had to route all my cell calls to my own phone switch, offer the call to a Jolly Roger bot, wait 4 seconds to see if Jolly Roger wants to pick it up (if the TrueCNAM score is 30 or worse), then check it against a blacklist I have, then check the caller ID against some patterns that I have expressly banned: no caller ID, out of country caller ID, toll-free area codes, and banning certain regions of the US like Phoenix/Tempe/Scottsdale, Washington DC and some other area codes where I know nobody legitimate calls me from there.... if it passes all those tests, the call is sent back to my cell phone using an app.
That's cut the nuisance calls by 98% after a month of hard work. Now that my phone is free again, everyone I want to call lets all their calls roll to voicemail---so it's easier to send a text message anyway.
The telecom companies don't seem interested in wanting to save the telephone network. Neither does the FCC, and it's STIR/SHAKEN protocol they have proposed has holes in it that let debt collectors have free reign to dump millions of calls on the network, and by extension those same holes left open for debt collectors will be there for carriers who dump scammer calls on to the network.
We are the last people left who see value in the telecom system. We don't want our loved ones scammed. We're tired of picking up the phone and listening to some Indian lying his ass off about a bullshit refund or telling your mother she's going to jail for defrauding the IRS.
So don't be gloomy that weekends are a bit on the dry side when numbers seem scarce. Scammers are busiest on Fridays. Indians tend to follow the US Eastern time zone (9AM Eastern to around 4PM) and then drop off. New Delhi is +05:30 from GMT and New York is typically -05:00GMT, so that sets up a work shift for an Indian from 7:30PM in their local time to 2:30AM.
20 year old Indians can certainly work a full day, take a nap if needed, and then sit in an office with cockroaches scuttling about the floors til 2 in the morning. Our job as scambaiters is to make their second job feel worthless and soul-crushing, and to get their boss angry as they lose money and have trouble paying rent and the Indians in their sweatshop.
I definitely take advantage of work-time off and also use my lunch breaks and dead time during my work day to scambait during peak times. Even if you can't do that, just know that every time you do make a call and get a bait started, even if it takes longer than normal because you're baiting off-peak, each call you make is one less call that Indian is going to make to ruin someone else's life, and it keeps that Indian off the telecom network harassing legitimate users of the system.
Every call is worth it.