Yeah, they spoof local numbers. I haven't lived in the city my area code is from in a long time. Occasionally I'll answer calls from there when I'm bored and it's always a scammer.
What's even more disturbing is that I'm now getting calls from people talking in Hindi. I answer in English but they ask me to switch to Hindi. (I'm from Pakistan and speak Urdu which is mutually intelligible with Hindi). I'm guessing it's to build familiarity/trust.
They want to pay off my phone, electric and other bills and in return I pay them 50% of the amount. I give them fake info and try to keep them on as long as possible... asking them to repeat multiple times. Sometimes I'll tell how thankful I am that they came to me with this 50% off offer because I'm facing financial troubles. Not once did any of them fell bad about trying to scam a poor person. Their response is usually something like "This is exactly why we are offering this service, to help people like you".
Eventually they get frustrated and hangup. This way I can hurt their ROI just a bit.
Similar to the Facebook outage earlier. Apparently everything is managed through Facebook accounts so employees could not get access to fix the issues.
The second and third definitions I get from define:poor on Google are:
- worse than is usual, expected, or desirable; of a low or inferior standard or quality.
- (of a person) considered to be deserving of pity or sympathy.
I suspect these might be why the term is discouraged.