A New Tactic of Telemarketers?

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First I'll tell you how it started: I am an autistic man who lives alone and although I don't need it now; I might later so I checked the monthly price of a medical alert device. As a result of my checking I received a lot of SPAM calls. I blocked the numbers; I learned the hard way that just because you block a number the telemarketer can still leave you a voice mail message. This one telemarketer has left me 8-10 voicemail messages each day for the past 2 days. Do they honestly think by being so annoying that it will make someone want to do business with them? What I feel is their approach now is that you become so annoyed that you will buy their product to make the annoyance stop. Has this tactic or something similar made it to your area yet?

Old tactic, especially with auto-dialers.  If you call them back even once and if only to tell them to knock it off, they will target you as a "live one" and not only barrage you with calls of their own but share your number with other telemarketers who will use the same tactic.

I have now blocked a whole area code, they did not ring before, but were clogging up my recent calls list, they'd scroll right under my finger as I would try to tap on a contact. Google is doing a pretty decent job of blocking them otherwise. The extra filter is meant to keep them off the recent call list.

If I want to check the price of something I just use the web. AFAIK they can't easily find out who I was and what my phone number is. I use NoScript and don't allow any scripts that aren't essential for the pages to function, and various other measures to inhibit tracking me.

I don't usually play back voicemail or answer calls from numbers I don't recognise as being OK. I don't use a phone much anyway. If I did and the marketing sods started trying to bother me, I'd probably get one of those Call Saint devices that blocks all callers that aren't on a user-defined list. Only problem is that sometimes the employees of businesses and service providers that I do want to hear from call from their own private phones. So you can never be sure you're not blocking a bona-fide caller. Still, I don't often want to hear from businesses and service providers by phone anyway.

The only unsolicited ad I've been duped into seeing recently was an email from my electricity provider with the subject line "we really need your meter reading." I thought I'd better look at it in case they - well - really needed my meter reading. But no, they were just using a Trojan horse to rant to me about getting a smart meter. Anyway at least they won't know I opened it. I've got my email client set to text-only so they can't tell.

They spam people because it's cheap for the advertiser to contact billions of people and they don't care how many people they annoy if they find one person who will buy what they're selling. Sometimes it doesn't even make economic sense though. Some websites put a lot of energy into messing up ad blockers even though it's obvious that anybody who hates ads enough to use an ad blocker is likely to get angry and make a point of never buying from them. I suppose some advertisers just aren't very bright. I know there are some gullible idiots out there, but most ads seem geared to the most stupid 0.00000001% of the population, and I don't see how there'd be enough of them to provide much of an income stream for their predators. Still, I gather we live in a world in which many people think a 40% chance of winning a bet is better than a 60% chance of losing it, so maybe I'm just used to scientific thinking and give people too much credit for having something resembling brains in their skulls.

UPDATE: The madness finally stopped. As of today( Feb 2) the telemarketers stopped leaving voice mails. Lessons learned - telemarketers will harass you for a week. After that, they'll move on if you don't respond

It's times like these, I wish this was a thing.