[hnbad]

I live in Germany, famous for having among the strictest privacy laws.

I still get occasional scam calls a few times each month, often using mobile phone numbers or fraudulent VOIP numbers registered in Austria. They usually hang up as soon as you push back on their claim that they got the phone number "from the database, maybe you participated in a contest once" when prompted with the question of how they got your number. The callers are mostly women with Eastern European accents.

I suspect my number ended up in a list when it was leaked in a Facebook data leak because I had to connect it once for account recovery/verification.