I live in Germany and I get a lot of spam calls and spam SMS. It's always in waves. Some days I stop answering calls if I don't recognise the number, because its one of these days where Interpol has informwd me already three times that my identity was stolen and I have to give them all my details to fix this ..... They're very patient at Interpol, I keep hanging up on them and they never give up.
When I have a spammer/scammer on the phone (and I actually picked up), I usually just put my phone on mute and stop talking to them. They waste a bit more time that way before they hang up (without more effort from me).