I’ve had some fun with people running IT scams out of India, but decided against documenting such. I have a real nice old lady voice I do. Doing it once, impulsively, was a stupid mistake; I got put on a call list.

And that’s probably how I treated hundreds of spammers over a couple of years to my acoustic rendition of Li’l Wayne’s “Ms. Officer” chorus hook for my voicemail. It does something like tricks algorithms into thinking that they’re on the line with a human instead of voicemail, because I get a lot of something like the last 2/5 of some recorded spam messages. I’m not really sure how it works, because most callers don’t leave a message at all, which seems weird.

I wish there was some common library of scam and botscam knowledge. But the landscape is changing so rapidly that anecdotes are about the best we can do.

That said, I do want to give a shout out to the recent legislation passed by the gov’t to curb phone spam calls. It’s made a serious difference for me - Album sales are at an all-time low. Jk it’s a free mixtape