I live in a city of 30,000. I also get the Sheriff report that comes out every week. Almost without fail there is at least one listing where a resident got taken by some sort of scam. Often the amount is in the 10s of thousands. We get about 3-4 calls per day that seem to be some sort of robo/scam. The don't leave messages. The most frequent one is asking about car warranty. We had an extended warranty but it ran out a year or two ago. I bet that company sells the lists.

There are some things that everyone has and a car is at the top of the list. If a TM company has a list of older people, it's diabetes and so on.

On the car warranty thing, any random generated number is likely to reach car owner. Why buy a list? They could have sold toilet paper at 3x the cost dialing randomly for 3 months last year.

Over the years, I have sold windows to 2 telemarketers working out their homes using real people. 30 years ago I happened on this guy living pretty well out in semi rural Orange County CA. He had all the numbers (then probably from the white pages) of rural farming states residences.

He'd start off with an offer for a ten dollar 10" carbide saw blade. He sold them by the 100's followed by air hoses and all the cheap import stuff. What I didn't know at the time was that there was a warehouse full of crates directly from china where these guys and flea market guys would go and stock up at 2/3rds of the then real cheap Harbor Freight prices. In fact, there weren't that many HF stores at the time and certainly none in the mid west.

All he did was start calling about dinner time Central time. The 2nd guy had a night job at Boeing but had a crew of 5 calling all day from his house during the day. I'm not sure what he sold and didn't ask. But he was driving a new Mercedes.

Both of these cats were petty slippery and I wondered all along if I was gonna get paid. I was, fortunately.