[giraffe_lady]

It is absolutely ridiculous that we've surrendered a genuinely incredibly useful contact method because of our unwillingness to address this malicious use of it.

Last year I missed an emergency call from a friend, that I was partially expecting. The call was from their caretaker's phone and I didn't have the number in my contacts, so I ignored it. They didn't die that time but they could have, and I wouldn't have been there.

Ignoring calls is simply not an appropriate solution to this. There are no appropriate individual solutions to any systemic problem, including this one.

[_mlbt]

What’s helped me a lot is that my phone number is from a different area code than the one I currently live at. So if it’s a local number I know it’s probably legit and if it’s from my phone’s area code I know it’s a scammer.