Woman Reveals How She Makes Spam Callers Pay Her Money In This Viral Thread

Unwanted calls, including illegal and spoofed robocalls, are the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) top consumer complaint and its top consumer protection priority. So as you can imagine, Americans receive plenty of them. But a Twitter user who goes by the name Miss Odessa has just posted a thread, explaining how Americans can make money off of them.

The Californian mother walked everyone through the multi-step process but some people, even though they appreciated the detailed guide, said the task seems a bit too demanding for their comfortable butts. Everyone wants free money.

NBC News reported that the number of scam calls to phone lines in the United States dropped by half at the start of the pandemic, as lockdowns closed the call centers necessary to robocall enterprises and reduced the number of phone lines with a person on the other end.

After the initial decline, robocalls started coming back, but then Covid-19 took over India and calls fell almost 20 percent from March to May, as the disease surged and prompted states and cities to institute a new wave of lockdowns.

Even though there's not much we can do about spammers and scammers from overseas (except maybe have fun with them as Kitboga does), we can at least celebrate that for every day they can't work, someone gets to keep their money. Alex Quilici, CEO of the voicemail provider and scam-blocking app YouMail, said the lockdowns have had the side effect of preventing people who work at call centers from going into those call centers. "They couldn't leave their homes, so they couldn't do the scams," Quilici said. "No point of making a robocall if no one's there when you press 1."

India, Pakistan, and the Dominican Republic are among the main origin points for illegal robocalls involving Social Security, debt collection, and bogus utilities, said Josh Bercu, vice president of policy and advocacy at USTelecom, the association that organizes the industry’s robocall tracing efforts. "Those types of pure fraud almost always are coming from overseas," Bercu told NBC News.

In October 2019, an estimated 5.7 billion scam calls reached consumers, according to data from YouMail. Quilici said that while a series of enforcement actions from the FCC and the Department of Justice brought the total down some in late 2019 and early 2020, they absolutely bottomed out in April and May 2020, falling by nearly half.