scammers

One of the most perplexing things about living in the smartphone era is the number of times a day the average person is harassed by a marketing robocall or, worse, a scammer. With all of the magnificent technology in this world, shouldn’t there be a way for phone carriers and the government to work together to prevent people from losing billions a year to scammers?

To make things worse, scammers now contact people through text, so you must continually delete texts that say, “Hey, how are you doing?” in addition to blocking spam callers. The terrible thing is that spam calls are only getting worse, with more than 14 billion sent yearly to Americans alone.

A graduate student who goes by Boopinmybop on Reddit was fed up with spam calls, so he made a Herculean effort to stop them. It was so effective that he had the scammers beg him to stop calling. The great thing was that it only took under an hour for him to achieve this righteous endeavor.

A man yelling at a spam call. via Canva/Photos

It all started in January 2024 when he was in a debt relief program, and his number got shared. Gradually, the number of spam calls he received from one group rose to about 15 daily. The scammers kept using different numbers so they couldn’t be defeated simply by blocking them. “I’m a PhD candidate, so I’m constantly either in meetings, giving presentations, or running sensitive experiments. And boy, getting those calls was incredibly disruptive,” he told BoredPanda.

Boopinmybop decided that the only way to stop it is to give the scammers a dose of their own medicine. “I called, put myself on mute, and hung up after 5-10 seconds of them talking. I did this exactly 266 times in 35 minutes,” they wrote. “Each time to the same number, I cycled through 20-30 employees with accents from Australia to India to the Mid Atlantic, at least three different company names they claimed to be from, and many, many scripts. Sometimes they’d start one script, then mess up and start on another. Other times, they’d just say ‘hello?’ The best was when they changed mid-script what company they were claiming to be from. Then sometimes they’d say 'Hello, Mr. Boop.' After about 150 calls, I started getting intermittently hung up on immediately after they answered the call. I knew I was getting to them.”

A spam call boss.via Canva/Photos

Eventually, he annoyed the scammers so much that his call was promoted to the top of the scam chain. “Finally, at call 260, I reach the final f***ing boss,” he wrote. “In a deep, mob boss type voice, I hear, and I kid you not: ‘Mr. Boop, you’ve gotta stop with these spam calls. I mean, seriously, you gotta have something better to do with your time.'" Isn’t it a little ironic for someone who runs a scam call center to accuse one of his targets of wasting his time dialing the phones all day? Maybe he had a sense of humor. Game recognize game, as they say.

Once Boopinmybop reached the top of the scam chain, the calls finally stopped, proving that you can beat scammers; you just have to play their own game.

There are a lot of apps and services provided by cellular carriers to help reduce the number of spam scams you receive. However, one of the easiest ways to stop them is not to pick up the phone. When you pick up the phone and it’s a spam call, even if you hang up immediately, it signals to the scammer that there’s someone on the other end of the phone number, opening the floodgates for more calls. When the spam call comes in, don’t even hang up on them, hit the “sleep/wake” button on your iPhone or Android, and send the call to voicemail.