For the purposes of this this thread, my name is Sam and my job responsibilities during certain time periods require me to be responsive to incoming calls on my personal phone from a large number of people who I know by name/face but I may not recognize their voice or have their phone number in my contacts (and to make matters worse, the calls are sometimes forwarded to me in a way that obscures the phone number)

I answer with "Hello" (*) and the caller often says "Sam?"... or "Is this Sam?"

I am wanting to pre-plan a response which accomplishes 2 things:

1. Does not confirm to a scammer / spammer that I really am Sam.

2. Is not excessively rude / distracting to legitimate callers.

What I considered:

• "Who is calling"

  • I think this gives away too much to a scammer. It clearly indicates the right number has been reached.

• "I'd be glad to answer if you let me know who you are."

  • Meh, it's a little convoluted to a legit caller, and it still conveys pretty clearly that I am Sam

• "Who is this" (spoken very quickly with a steady pitch low in my voice range, as if it's a challenge rather than a question)

  • I like this best among the options so far, because I hope it might possibly put into the Scammer's head that I'm irritated to receive the phonecall because I'm not Sam... but it's not excessively unfriendly to legit callers.

QUESTION: What other ways can you think of to respond to the question.

(*) When I remember, I answer the phone right off the bat with "Hello, who is this" which avoids the whole problem. But after years of answering "Hello", I often forget to include the "who is this" part.... and that's the scenario this thread is trying to address.