New record for scammers

<p>Get a phone service that requires that someone punch in a random 2 digit number before the call goes through. MagicJack supports that, but many SIP providers will do this as well. Just give this phone number out and never give out your regular number. Block outgoing Caller ID on your phone permanently too. Never put your main phone number on a business card or give it out to people who may share it, or companies, especially for the purpose of SMS notifications because they will inevitably be sold to advertisers and end up in the hands of scammers. There are temporary SMS websites that allow you to use them for account setups for things like Gmail and Microsoft accounts. Once set up, remove the phone number and use a different account notification or verification method like a secondary email address. Don't use smartphone authenticator apps either because Google and Microsoft both read a whole bunch of user-identifiable data from your phone. These things are NOT built with privacy in mind.</p><p><br></p><p>For website owners: don't put an email address anywhere on your page or else you should expect spam. Use a contact form with some form of Captcha instead. I would advise site owners to use a Captcha-like system that uses a server-side generator instead of using Javascript because a lot of people block Javascript now, and it can also get caught up in ad and privacy blockers and such. reCAPTCHA is a Google property, and privacy blockers will block whole swaths of Google domains. Use a Captcha-like service that respects privacy and doesn't use Google, or else install something directly on your own hosting platform, so long as it doesn't use client-side Javascript. It will give the user a better experience anyway, since it's not processing on their own computer. There are PHP-based form validation programs that will do this. You can also use hidden fields that bots will often read and fill in. Some simple validation can reject messages where those fields contain data, so that only valid user submissions missing that data will be saved.</p>