Nate writes:
If the media is to be believed, this has happened for years with the
elderly being targeted for Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/etc. scams
and a lot of folks being bilked out of large sums of money. With phone
directory information online from several sources getting one's name and
phone number are trivial exercises.
Those calls were not automated. They were just ordinary con men working
over the phone. Each call used up the con man's time so it had to be
carefully targetted so as to be likely to yield substantial money. That
kept the total volume down. These calls are fully automated and usually
use cracked PBXs so the cost per call is down there with spams sent from
bots. Thus we can expected to receive millions of them.