Which is why nowadays I never take calls if the prefix is from a country I don't have connections with, it is private, or doesn't map to any of my contacts.

If it is someone that I actually know, they will be aware how to actually reach me.

If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)

There was a time I had a scheduled job interview and got two spam calls from the same area code as the interviewer 2 minutes before. The third time, I hung up on the actual interviewer.

I paid for a spam call blocking service about twenty years ago. The annoying thing is not only did it fail to prevent the spam calls from abroad, when someone was trying to call me from Germany it wouldn't let the call through.