Each time you answer a call from an unknown (scammer) number you simply confirm to the scammer that your line/number is working and there is someone on the end of the line who is willing to talk to the scammers. As a result, they will just keep calling you in the hope they will get to talk to someone who will be taken in by their scam routine. A good start would be to avoid answering calls from unknown numbers. Let them ring out or go to voicemail/answering machine.
If you are getting these calls on a landline, you may have some features on your phone which might help (such as setting it to a 'do not disturb' mode where the phone does not ring and goes to answering machine. Use this in conjunction with any VIP feature (tagging contacts in your address book as VIPs) and then allowing VIPs to break through the 'do not disturb' setting. The result would be that your phone would only ring for people you know and all other calls would go to answering machine.
If your phone does not have those features, consider an add-on device such as trueCall described in a topic from yesterday, below
https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Security-matters/Phone-Call/m-p/5459622#M53646
a new trueCall unit is quite expensive at £109.99 but it does work very well. Cheaper second hand units come up on eBay (with the usual caveats that apply to eBay purchases). When I used a trueCall device on my landline in the past it cut my scam calls to zero.
If you are getting the calls on your mobile, some devices, such as the iPhone, have an 'unknown callers' setting which keeps your phone silent for unknown callers and directs those calls to voicemail. There are also a variety of mobile apps to detect scam calls (which are based on large databases of scam numbers) and give notifications of incoming calls which are on the app's scam database.
