Where I live, there is zero cell service. I mean, I can text people because we have the internet, but if I want to take or make a call? Then I have to wander outside and walk around with my phone held in the air until I find the one spot, approximately four inches square, where I have a single bar of service.

Midcoast resident Heather D. Martin wants to know what’s on your mind; email her at heather@heatherdmartin.com.

Because of this, we decided, like all of our neighbors, to get a landline. Which sort of cracks me up because I used to laugh at folks who still had landlines. Still, it allows us to make a call if we need one.

The downside to the landline (apart from feeling silly) is that we get a lot of scammer spoofing calls. I know we are not alone in this. A lot of you are getting crazy calls, too.

I know one neighbor most definitely is, because he called us about it.

Yes, one night last week our answering machine clicked on to record a message from a man who was angry. No, make that Angry. It was definitely capital letter “A” angry.

Despite the cheerful and, dare I say it, downright friendly outgoing message on our machine wherein my husband thanks everyone for calling our little farm, the person on the other line was far from charmed. Or charming.

The message began with a hollered threat to call the police on us if we rang his number one more time, and ended by screaming offensive names at us. Really offensive.

The thing is, we never called him. Obviously. Not even once, let alone multiple times. This man was a victim of “spoofing,” a fairly common scamming technique where evil doers use software to make their actual number appear like a different one – usually one local to the person they are calling.

People are more likely to answer the phone if they recognize the number, or at least if it seems like a neighbor. Using this technique, scammers managed to steal over $65 billion dollars from Americans in 2022 alone, according to robokiller.com.

To keep your dollars safe, the FCC has an entire webpage devoted to the topic – fcc.gov/spoofing – and it is worth a read, but in short, never give out personal information over the phone, especially if the other party has called you. Don’t answer questions from an unknown caller, especially those that can be answered with a “yes” or a “no.” That is a scammer trick in order to record your voice and use it in ways you never intended.

Likewise, don’t press any buttons “to avoid getting calls in future” – that’s another scam. Don’t ask questions, don’t stay on the line, don’t banter. Just hang up.

Best plan of all, just don’t answer. That’s our policy. We let the machine get it. We only pick up if we know the person who is leaving a message.

Which, ironically, is how we came to have the complete saga from an angry, angry human which we can now replay and listen to whenever we feel like becoming seriously depressed about the state of the world, and which he could have saved himself from sending if he’d realized spoofing was a thing, and that it was unlikely the unknown neighbors he was verbally abusing were the folks who had actually made those calls.

I hope he didn’t lose any money or compromise information along the way. I hope the scammers leave him alone in the future, and I hope all of you manage to sidestep their sneaky ways and keep yourselves safe from thievery.

I also hope that all of us, when faced with frustration, take a moment and pause before saying harsh words to another, even if we think we have just cause. After all, life is short, and to quote Ram Dass, “we are all just walking each other home.”