it came after the ones from the IRS stopped. States are apparantly trying to address this, but some of the problems is that the scammers are spoofing local telephone numbers from people in your area or even from your friend's number so it's hard to catch them.

I have stopped answering my landline and just let it go to voice mail. If someone wants to talk to me they can leave a message or call my cell phone which I have a special ringtone for my contact list.

Don't respond because as the IRS and SSA state that if they need to get a hold of you they will send you a letter. And if they are going to call you they will give a date and time for it.

spam... report as said above and ignore. do not call back. if they keep calling, let it ring until it stops and do not pick up or send to messages.

The do not call list is not monitored or enforced. Waste of time. I think it leads them right to you. I just tell them to FO and hang up.

First, you cannot stop them as the calls are originating out of typically India or nearby countries. I got a call with "synthesized" voice from the "IRS" numerous times with threatening overtones. Lately they have been pretty direct about threatening to put me in jail.

But IRS is not the only scam. There are literally hundreds of people in call centers doing this and various other scams. The second most popular one involves getting a popup on your computer claiming you have a virus and call such and such a number, and then you are scammed out of several hundred dollars of support you don't need.

My buddy's sister-in-law got swindled out of $7,000 by the IRS scammers. They have scammed millions of dollars from people in English speaking countries--Canadians get similar calls. In Silicon Valley various supermarkets warned their clerks about people buying thousands of dollars of various things like iTune cards which the scammers demanded.

Here is link to IRS about some scams.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-scams-consumer-alerts

But there are people who troll the scammers and record the trolls on youtube. Here is a rather brutal/stark one. The guy doing the voice is Arab-American.

Look up a guy named Hoax Hotel who trolls various types of scammers.

So why are they calling you? From watching a number of these videos, the scammers rely on getting ahold of various databases. The calls are not random. They profile the best victims to call for various scams. Age is one of the profiling factors. A buddy says that after he calls any Indian based customer support group, he starts getting scam calls. There are people in the legit centers who are either selling names or part of these groups.

As for the title. India in particular has a thriving scam industry that uses call center technologies. It is big business there given the tens of millions they scam. One group that was busted had 200 people occupying four floors of a building. There are individual scammers in various other places, but none of them match the Indians in technology and span of different types of scams.

False phone calls scamming in the name of a Federal Government Agency is a Federal offense and is investigated and prosecuted by the FBI. So a quick chat with your local FBI field office would be a good idea.

As my fellow c99ers have already told you, these Federal agencies send bad news by either US Postal Mail or, at the worst, by having you served. They do not cold-call you on the phone demanding stuff. Ever.

One technique I use when I'm pretty sure I'm dealing with a bot is to give ridiculous answers to the caller's questions:

CALLER: What is your Social Security number?
ME: ABCDEFG....
CALLER: What is your mother's maiden name?
ME: Marijuana!
CALLER: Don't you want to hear the details of our wonderful offer?
ME: When, in the course of human events, .....

etc.

I recognize the caller. This keeps calls from going to my voice mail which I then have to access and get a bunch of messages with nothing in them. So, I answer without speaking and put down the phone until they hang up.

I figure that I am costing callers a few cents on each call I answer. When I do not speak, most of the times the robo call just hangs up. Other times after a few seconds or so, the call will start. I have found that pressing dialpad two is often the way to be taken off lists (of course, they just sell the number to someone else).

Anyway, since I have been doing this (it has been quite awhile), the number of robo calls I have been receiving have been reduced. Scams cannot work if you don't even hear them.

...unless it is from a number on my contact list.

When I see another call, I always Google it and if I suspect spam, I block the number. It's a pain in the neck but it reduces such calls a bit. Number blocking Aps help, too.

In the internet age, is anything personal? Perhaps loss of privacy is the price we pay to access new technology. Such a bargain!

I just don't answer the phone at all any more unless I recognize the number. Been getting a lot of 5-second silent voicemails lately, numbers from all over the US. I got the IRS one once too. One time I even got one that was spoofing my own number! That time an actual human answered; I said I knew it was a scam and she immediately hung up.
So yeah, nothing really you can do other than ignore them. I like the idea of playing the three-note disconnected sound though.

Whatever you do, just don't call the number back and chew out the unsuspecting person on the other end; that happened to me a while ago too. I got two back-to -back calls from a number I didn't recognize, so I answered the second time and an older woman answered, then handed it off to a man who accused me of calling them, which of course I hadn't. It was ok when I explained what happened, but uuuuuughhhh, fuck scammers!!

And let the automatics handle it. But if I'm feeling especially annoyed, I answer, give them the idea they have a fish on the hook, then say "Oh, can you hold on a second?" and put the phone down, until the off-hook beep comes out. If they're gonna waste my time, I'll waste theirs.
Other tricks:
don't say "hello", say "speak" or something else their speech recog doesn't expect.
if there's a 1 or 2 sec pause, you know it's a bot making connections to an operator.
if the calling number is from your area code and exchange but it's not one you know, it's spam. They spoof that part of the number very often.
Occasionally I tell them I'm on the no-call list and they panic hang up.
I once took the effort to track down the company (searched on the calling number), found a state's attorney's office that was after them, then called them to tell them I was referring it to so-and-so's office. That particular company had a habit of changing storefronts in Florida and numbers.

Most of this activity should be illegal and may well be, but just imagine what kind of budget the enforcement office has these days, now that the govt's not even pretending to look after the hoi polloi any more. Especially if they have to enforce it in India.