Well I messed up somewhere while researching something - whether it was VOIP or a security product or backup or what have you. Maybe it was one of those free webinars I signed up for. Or to get a quote on a product. Or possibly to download a free whitepaper.

Don't make the mistake I did and leave a real number. One of these sites will resell your information to a million vendors and then you are screwed.

Now I get calls every day for backup, security services, phishing prevention, etc. All from relatively unknown companies. Some seem to be scams or possibly companies that are just getting information to generate more leads to sell to other companies. They call from random numbers, don't have a real email address, don't have a real website, etc. You ask to be taken off their call list and they call back the next week.

Since we are all sysadmins we can hopefully create fake aliases on our email addresses and remove them when done. But getting a few phone calls a day from random sales people makes me not want to answer any calls whose caller ID I don't recognize anymore. And it's wasting my time when I accidentally answer something that I thought was needed and getting more irritating every day.

So yeah, don't leave your number anywhere.