Sadly, area codes are no longer a meaningful signal of anything. My family has three cell phones and one VOIP number; and those use four different area codes, hundreds of miles apart.
It's a signal that a call is a scam - 99.99999% of calls to me from the area code of my phone number (and surrounding area codes) are worthless scam calls, because of https://xkcd.com/1129/
I'd love to ignore all calls from unknown numbers EXCEPT the actual area code I reside in, which they don't know. Then calls from schools, doctors, etc might actually get through.
As it is, those go to voicemail and I get them eventually.
His year is off -- my area code is where I lived in 2002-03 and specifically not in 2005, but yeah. I blocked all that area code except for a couple specific numbers.
I regularly get scam calls that spoof my area code.
Hell, my number is even commonly spoofed! Every few months, I get a call from someone, then I get to explain to them that scammers can spoof phone numbers.
I got threatened with violence, while I was watching my first born child sleep, hours after her birth, by someone who was convinced I'd spent the previous hours repeatedly calling his girlfriend.
I thought that would work for me, and I got a local number before moving across the country. Somehow I’m getting spam calls from where I actually live now, and not from my phone’s area code. No idea how that happens. I haven’t gotten a single spam call from the area code.
I have a Wyoming area code. There are less than a million of those in circulation. I haven't lived in Wyoming in years, so the odds that a call with a Wyoming area code is both a) not already in my contacts and b) legitimate, is basically zero. So I let every single (307) call go to voicemail, and if they leave a message at all, I listen to it (and 99 times out of 100 discover that its a failed robocall. That 1 time, its an authentic wrong number, and I've called a few back if it sounded like something they were expecting to hear back about).
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