[bityard]

Somebody at some point is purchasing them, probably not the spammers/scammers themselves.

It's very unlikely anybody is placing spam/scam calls with regular cell phones when VoIP numbers are easy and cheap to get, and when VoIP systems are far easier to manage.

[tmp10423288442]

You would think that someone is getting real cell phone numbers, for the same reason scammers value residential IPs rather than data center IPs.