Before cell phones, phones were opportunities. Calls could be anything. Maybe you won something or a politician is cold calling constituents or something. Maybe someone got your number from a friend and is calling for the first time.

Its just very old habits that are hard to kill. Younger folks see random calls as almost certain scams. Text messages or emails with links get deleted immediately. Theres essentially a 0% chance a random call or text is actually beneficial to me.

I have way too many things I need to answer that I don't know the number of, and/or get mislabeled by the phone company, to do that, or trust "scam likely".

My primary care physician's office is scam likely My neurosurgeon's office is scam likely My neurologist's office is scam likely

I have a feeling the phone company, or whoever they get those labels from, might just be putting any number for a business name, linked to an Indian name, as "scam likely". They don't get my Orthopedic surgeon's office wrong, or my nephrologist's, or my endocrinologist's, or my podiatrist's and those are ones with European names. Everyone else, scam likely, even ones I didn't list here, everyone else are doctors from India/Indian decent.

I also get a lot of calls from government phones, and other private businesses, that just show "unknown", or a number I don't recognize, but are important for me to answer. I don't know these numbers ahead of time, because they don't know who is going to call me back when these contacts are arraigned.

I always answer unknown numbers.

I don't get scam calls or marketing calls. I've had a marketing ban on this number and it has never been listed and it's about 25 years old or so. Like maybe once or twice I put it somewhere and got calls offering gym memberships for a while but that was a single place and I told them I have a marketing ban on my number so they stopped. It genuinely works to a very reasonable degree here in Finland. It's not perfect but nothing is.

So when an unknown caller calls me it's usually a doctor or some such thing I actually do need to reply to. During the daytime. At night it's the police or fellow criminals.

I answer most calls but rarely get them. When it's a scam, it's usually the "play a recording and only use a real person if they push 1 at the end of it to talk to a real person" type. I'll either hang up quickly or if I'm feeling bored and trollish I'll hit 1 and pick apart their plot holes (like if they say there's a warrant or my package is being held, why the fuck do they need to ask for my name?). Then they get frustrated that I pushed the button when I clearly know it's a scam and hang up. I think the reason it's rare that I get those calls is because they also put me on a "waste of time, don't call" list or something like that.

I setup an IVR on my parents landline and a whitelist to bypass it if they're on the 'contact list'. Doesnt stop manual callers, but it stops all the automated calls.

Aren't the shown phone numbers spoofed?