is there a way to

There is another scam that involves calls that only ring for a short time and hang up or hang up almost immediately if answered. These are call back bait - if you call back to find out about your missed call it goes to a high rate premium number. You find out how badly you've been scammed when the bill comes in.

This is the “One Ring” or “Wangiri” scam Interestingly I receive such calls after using WhatsApp and talking/chatting with specific friends. I suspect they have installed some kind of mall ware on their mobiles, so that the scammers get their contacts. Fortunately I was not so stupid to answer such call anyway :)

Huh, I didn't know about that one. My landline phone doesn't do Caller ID though, so it wouldn't work on me that way. On rare occasions automated scam and political advertising messages have been left on my answering machine though (I guess they detect the beep). A convincing message left there could probably trick me into calling back.

"This is the Canada Revenue Agency. Please call back immediately regarding your tax return. Be aware that failure to reply, or not replying truthfully, can result in severe penalties."

Yeah, right.

That would be a skilful spammer, most assume you're in the USA. I've had no end of issues with my First National and Bank of America accounts, also problems with my amazon.com prime account, the FBI seem to have lost interest they were after me by email some years back.

Perhaps these spammers think Ireland is a suburb of Boston.

Joe Biden seems to think it is...

Yup. In the e-mail version, they even attach Government of Canada logos to make it look more convincing.

For a while I was getting bogus notices of outstanding traffic tickets. They did a good job of sounding threatening while omitting minor bits of information like location, licence number, etc. One of them attached a photo of a street I've never seen, complete with a time stamp stating that it was UTC+2. Since our time zone is (currently) UTC-7, that was a bit of a giveaway.

I don't even know what street Canada is on. -- Al Capone

And the tapes were easy to archive. Try to save/download voicemail. No such option.

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NEVER say "hello". The predictive dialer listens for that. I always say "good morning/evening/...". That usually gets silence.

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