Why do phone scammers always start by asking, "How are you today?"?

The phone scammers I get don’t do that. They start with, “this is the claims department, your PG&E bill is three months past due and your account is being red-flagged for service interruption for non payment.”

Asking how you are doing is part of our cultural social contract. It requires you to be polite. It makes it harder then to simply hang up on them and not feel rude.

My ‘real’ – official name is 8 letters long and has three syllables. And it sounds like a name people were given in the 1920s. NO ONE calls me that.

I go by the shortened – nickname – version of the name. (Example Artaxerxes might be known as Art)

It is a 99% certainty that if the phone rings and use my ‘official’ name, that (a) the person is trying to sell me something, (b) they don’t know me, and© I have zero interest in talking with them.

A that point, it’s fair game to just hang up.

Maybe they are being polite? I always ask “how are you?” when I call anyone.

If I don’t know who’s calling, or if the caller ID says “spam,” then I typically don’t answer it. It eliminates having to deal with sales people and spammers.

They may not be scammers, they are probably just sales people. But as someone above said, if they ask how you are, they are getting you engaged and trying to keep you on the phone longer so they can make their pitch.

@janbb there is a very weak line between spammers and sales people. So weak that it is usually hard to tell the difference.

@elbanditoroso But – “scammers” which the OP and I referred are different from either spammers or sales people.

It’s all part of their script.