There exist services that attempt to weed out these kind of calls. Not sure about their effectiveness though. I have noticed within the past year I've been getting way more scam calls than ever. Did call centers get a boost from lockdown bs?
Empirically, it seems landlines are getting deluged with scam calls while mobile providers seem to be doing a better job weeding them out with the new STIR/SHAKEN thing that got implemented.
When I converted my long time job to a permanent work from home one. I ported the office number to a cell phone. Prior to that, the number as a landline was getting all sorts of scam/telemarketer calls. Since the number became mobile, the number of scam calls has dropped by approximately 60% and some of those that still get through are being flagged with "Suspicious" or "Scam Call".
As a more direct answer to your question, I'd suspect that scammers are taking advantage of the fact more people are home now (out of work, working from home, etc.) that they've increased their efforts to contact and scam as many people as possible.
When I last upgraded my phone, I went about a week before remembering to shut off background data usage for all the apps. Everything was sucking down a ridiculous amount of data, even the fucking calculator.
The aforementioned porting to a cell phone resulted in the phone complaining when I turned off mobile data that had been switched on as default. I don't use the phone for video calls or mobile web browsing so I don't need to burn through my monthly data like it wished I would.
I know because I append postfixes (e.g. (actual account)+ebay) and the spam mails always contain them too. Makes such stuff easy to track and block without having to set up 9 proxies and 20 email addresses.
I do the same thing because it's easier to delete or /dev/null a compromised post-fix or forward-only alias and replace it than it is to delete an e-mail address and try to set up a new one.
In the US you have Micro Center as the exception to that, but in lucky there is 1 in my state, and even more lucky that its not that far away. Most states do not have one.
Agreed. I've had great experiences from the nearby Micro Center. It's a shame there aren't more of them, but I can understand why they might not want to overextend their market.
A trend I hate is the planned obsolescence with computers. My home office PC apparently isn't compatible with Windows 11 requirements, so I'd likely have to get a new one when the time comes that I'd have no choice but to upgrade. Even with utilities that help, it's still a pain to move data and essential applications from one computer to another and have to do it regularly.
