Yeah, they spoof local numbers. I haven't lived in the city my area code is from in a long time. Occasionally I'll answer calls from there when I'm bored and it's always a scammer.
What's even more disturbing is that I'm now getting calls from people talking in Hindi. I answer in English but they ask me to switch to Hindi. (I'm from Pakistan and speak Urdu which is mutually intelligible with Hindi). I'm guessing it's to build familiarity/trust.
They want to pay off my phone, electric and other bills and in return I pay them 50% of the amount. I give them fake info and try to keep them on as long as possible... asking them to repeat multiple times. Sometimes I'll tell how thankful I am that they came to me with this 50% off offer because I'm facing financial troubles. Not once did any of them fell bad about trying to scam a poor person. Their response is usually something like "This is exactly why we are offering this service, to help people like you".
Eventually they get frustrated and hangup. This way I can hurt their ROI just a bit.
Similar to the Facebook outage earlier. Apparently everything is managed through Facebook accounts so employees could not get access to fix the issues.
All of that is totally fine and not what people are upset about. If your entire app is just a web browser that renders your website, that should be fine too.
The problem is when they render external websites and unsuspecting users think they are using the phone's web browser. That is something Apple/Google can have rules about without banning/restricting web views.
Apple and Google have guidelines about what apps are/aren't allowed to if they want to be on their app store.
"Protecting the user" is supposed to be one reasons they take a 30% cut of all in app purchases. Apple even uses this as an excuse to not allow side loading apps.
You could start by giving them more realistic car details.
I engaged them one time when I got really annoyed. Gave fake car details (but realistic), call back number of local McDonalds, and then kept asking for details about the coverage. I eventually declined it and the sales agent got super pushy with scare tactics so I hung up.
This is totally valid and the point is to send a signal to the “writers”.