Although most of the spam calls I get are bots on the other end - political, police shakedown, lazy leadgen for some company (eg cable TV), etc.
The ones that are actually human are generally outright scams targeted at old people ("microsoft", "medicare", etc). After playing along for a bit, I ask them if their parents know that their job is to scam old people all day and if they consider that success. That usually gets them pretty riled up.
Oh, hey! I'm not the only one whose done this. A couple of other good one:
- "How did you get into this line of work? Are your parents frauds too? Is it a genetic thing maybe we can weed out? Who do your parents rip off?"
- "When you see your family on the holidays, do you tell them you're a professional fraud, or do you actually have a sliver of shame? Do you have like sibling who think your cool for ripping people off?"
- "What does your god think of how you make a living?"
Get cussed out some, but most of them are obviously fine with it, usually via some variation of "hey gotta pay bills, just doing my job". The 'smile and dial' crowd self selects for zero-ethics worldviews. The god one did get me a death threat, which is nice. I'm sure they added me to a bunch of call lists as 'revenge'. Worth it.
