What can be done about the support phone number spam wave?

This is an on-going campaign which has been ebbing and flowing for a couple of years already, but the load on this small site is rather significant at the moment.

I wanted to create a meta post here on behalf of the Charcoal anti-spam team just to help coordinate the efforts to combat this abuse.

In fact, I will be recycling some of my answer from a similar one I wrote on ServerFault's meta when they were being targeted in early 2022, by the same spammer.

The trivial and obvious way to help out is to keep an eye on new posts on the site and flag as spam any which are part of this campaign. Don't vote to close as off-topic, probably don't waste time leaving comments that the spammer will not read anyway; do flag as spam (click flag and select the spam option).

Another simple way to help is to join the Charcoal HQ chat room and flag the spam as it's being reported there, in near real time based on a battery of regular expressions and other detection techniques. You will need to have 30 20 reputation to join chat.

If you can analyze the archived spam and help develop better detection rules, that's obviously a very valuable sort of contribution. Authorized users are also encouraged to !!/blacklist-number any new phone numbers we don't currently detect, though you need to be an enrolled team member with some amount of participation in the project before you can be granted these privileges.

(Our general guidance calls for several confirmed spam reports before we blacklist anything, but this particular campaign is far above and beyond anything we have seen before, and so we have relaxed the blacklisting criteria for this particular phone support spam campaign.)

Perhaps see also our guidance at https://charcoal-se.org/ if you are interested in taking part. You'll want to familiarize yourself with our back-end system metasmoke where we archive all the spam reports with full-text search etc for further analysis.

For fun, here is the recent site graph for Salesforce from metasmoke:

I'm not a regular on this site, although as an active spam flagger, I have found myself visiting frequently in the recent past. (-: