imo the best way to combat this is to answer the call and waste as much of the scammers time as possible. Call spamming only scales because most people ignore or hangup immediately. If you waste 30seconds of a scammers time thats 30 more people they cant call. And that 30 seconds costs THEM money. I just answer say “hi” to start the recording and leave the phone on my desk until they hangup. Perhaps i dont completely understand the backend but if more people wasted the scammers time it would quickly become too expensive for them to continue.
When I was getting robocalls a while back, I started saying "hi" and letting them talk, then I'd put the phone on mute and continue whatever I was doing. The calls stopped a few weeks after that. Usually this would take about 10 seconds of my time, and about 90 seconds of theirs, per call.
I'm pretty sure that over the long term, it costs me less time as it made the problem completely go away.
Things that I'd tried before that, that didn't work, include: immediately hanging up, politely and no-so-politely asking them not to call back.
