Remember: Even though almost everyone has cell phones, plenty of people have landlines just as a backup, for work, in an office, etc.

The first clue for me that this is a scam would be getting a human being on the line when calling any bank.

Whenever I get a call saying my bank account is compromised, I always just thank them for letting me know and tell them I'll sort everything out in person at my local branch tomorrow. One of them insisted on shutting my account down, and I just said "aight then do it, I'll figure out the rest at my branch." That shut her up really quick.

I actually knew about this feature decades ago. I recall always reminding my dad to hang up the phone so the line doesn't stay busy. I am afraid most of the victims of this scam will be elderly people who still rely on landlines and not aware of this threat.

This “glitch” was what allowed my boyfriend and me to talk late into the night decades ago. He would call me before dinner when I was allowed to be on the phone for 15 minutes. Then I would say goodbye and hang up and he would leave his off the hook. After my parents went to bed I would sneak downstairs pick up and wait for him to get back to his phone. It was great because the house phone didn’t have to ring and alert the parents 😂

I loved the stock footage of the guy pointlessly tapping away on an upside down phone lol

this is so interesting because I feel like in a lot of old movies you'll see someone angrily hang up a landline and then quickly pick it back up and expect the other person to still be there on the line. I always thought that was so silly because they hung up the call. I feel like this is the reason scenes like that exist and weren't immediately cut for being unrealistic!

2:14 this guy is such a genius, using his phone upside down

Nice job pointing out how to deal with this scam. I do actually use my cell phone to call any numbers from calls that I receive on my landline phone, and I always use a answering machine to screen phone calls before I answer them on my landline. Any messages I get concerning my financial matters, legal matters, or technological matters, I usually wait till the next day to call them anyway.
Procrastination saves a lot of time and hassle in matters like this.

When I suspect a scammer is calling me, I quietly put the phone to my ear without saying "hello". If there is dead silence, I'll say "police department" or "detective Jones". They always hang up.

An old "engineering" complication: the more convenient you make a system to use, the easier it becomes to abuse.

Thanks so much for exposing all this.
My elderly mother has a landline and I have briefed her on this scam.
If she's told to call back, she either doesn't call at all, but if she's concerned and wants to call her bank etc she just uses her cell to call, not her landline.

Back in the old days, some crank callers could camp on your phone line by calling you then not say a word but also not hang up. You could wait long periods of time like an hour, and they would still be there. It was super creepy.

This explains when I worked in a contact centre why sometimes when the customer had finished the call and I'd sit there finishing off my notes that I would hear them pick up the phone and start dialing into my ear. I always assumed that they just never hung up correctly but this explains it.

I still remember receiving calls on my old landline ...

After call ended I hung up phone. My friend (caller) didn't hangup correctly so it never disconnected. I had to go to their house and hang up the phone just so I could use my phone. There was no way to contact my friend because his phone was still connected to my phone. The fun part was I could hear everything happening near the phone. It was like having a 'bug' on the phone. Sometimes I could yell loud enough he could hear me through his handset, he was freaked when I told him what I just heard. He was more careful after that.

Is it just me who thinks Verizon's response was more satisfying than AT&T's because of how specific the seconds they laid out and acknowledged Call Clearing? AT&T's phrasing feels like a response for someone who didn't take the effort to look up what Joe was asking

This little phone quirk was well-known when I was a kid in the 60's and 70's and of course it was exploited to the max with prank phone calling.

I remember this from the 70's. A contemporary at school, 7th grade was making multiple, every 5 mins phone calls to my house just to harass me. When I figured this out, I kept the phone off the hook. We didn't get any calls (we were tired of hearing it ring anyway) but their phone was also blocked from making or receiving calls. When her parents came home and wanted to know why their phone didn't work my Mama was more than glad to explain it to them. This girl had been doing this from the time school let out till her parents came home for weeks.

Up through the at least the 1970s, Bell Telephone called this "Priority Calling". The caller had priority over the line. The audio portion is an AC signal through the phone line for your voice. There is also a DC signal used for billing. When the receiving line picks up, it closes a set of contacts in the receiving phone starting the billing cycle. The audio signal also is connected at this time. If either party hangs up, the billing cycle is stopped. If the caller does not hang up, the line remains open. If the receiving caller picks up the phone later, they are still connected to the caller. There were no timers on the line. This was a problem if the caller did not hang up the phone correctly and left the line open. The receiving phone could not call out. Check out any older phone, the design is such that the receiver could not stay on the phone partially, it would always fall to the ground if it were not hung up properly.

You touched upon the reason this feature exists... money. The person making the call is paying for it. If the call lasts longer than they expected it to because they get cut off and they don't realize that eh person hung up, they might think that the person they were speaking to would come back.. but they are just holding a line and in the old days, phone calls cost money. Especially if you called long distance.