I just saw some really bad advice on Reddit. Someone suggested that when you take a call from a scammer, you should put some effort into complaining, to waste their time and convince them to not call anymore. Please do not do this.

The chance of you convincing a scammer to change their deceitful ways is fairly close to zero. No one will remove you from their scammer call list, and in fact, they may deliberately pass your info around to other scam-call companies. There is no version of this phone call where you gain anything of value from it. But also, there is a small risk of danger.

In rare instances, a scammer may swat their victim. Swatting is when someone reports a fake emergency to the police, that targets a victim and their residence. The swatter may lie about a bomb threat or a domestic situation, leading police to speed to the scene. I will state the obvious here: You do not want the police coming to your door, weapons at ready, prepared for a violent situation.

Swatting is rare, but it does happen. Some scammers are just that evil, and secure in the thought that they cannot be tracked down. So the safest thing to do in the face of a scam phone call is to simply hang up, without further comment.