‘Can you hear me?' Don't answer that!

Not one person has been able to provide that proof after almost 2 years of this alleged scam running.  There is nothing but news reports that say "might, maybe, or possibly".

The only (anecdotal) stories I have ever heard of this was with the printer toner scammers. But it wasn't just the "Can you hear me?". They would record the conversation with you about the toner, and at some point try to get you to say yes to their "free" offer, and. They would send cruddy toner and an invoice and demand payment, using an edited version of the  call to make it sound like you actually ordered something and change the terms, sometimes threatening legal action to get paid.  So there's some dialog going on, not just recording a single "yes". Enough of a conversation, so that if you heard the edited audio, you might think that you misheard and agreed to something you really didn't. The last time I got a toner scammer call, the person on the line seemed to mute her microphone quite a bit while I was talking (keep the audio clean from all the background noise in the call center?), so I suspect they might edit audio if they thought they could send me something. So as a general practice, I try to avoid using the word "Yes" just as a precaution when talking to telemarketers.

But like BigA, I've never heard anything on the alleged "Can you hear me?" scam. And many people here have been asking and searching. But nothing.

When i get the toner calls at the office I'm a gatekeeper for I just say "No, thanks" or "We're not interested" as soon as they say why they're calling, then hang up. I've been dealing that way with scam callers at work for many years.

In my experience, the "Can you hear me?" question has always been associated with Robo calls that ask Yes/No questions as a way to qualify the recipients as being a candidate for a real person who will try to close the deal and take the CC number.  Because as of now, the robots can only deal with Yes/No questions, this helps keep the urban legends about "Saying Yes" alive.
    I did some more more checking and found there are companies who specialize in ONLY making the calls and doing the qualification and then passing the victim off to another call center or to an "agent". This is sometimes called "Lead Generation".
    These robots are getting pretty good.  I got a call and after passing the test questions, it was taking time for me to get connected to the live agent.  After 20 and 40 seconds, the robot asked me questions to make sure I was still on the phone and holding.  The robot asked me if I had "seen any of the new movies that came out this weekend" and then asked me about the weather "we were having".

I have been on mission tracking down a outfit that basically sells scamming franchises called Senior Authority - Helping Hands.  The scamming system offered for franchise relies heavily on the interactive Robo calls made by companies that run only the Robo portion of the scam.  To me, this is a whole new level of sleeze.

It does indeed include an apologetic voice blaming her headset, with the "can you hear me" scam, as well as a robo request "I'm sorry I couldn't hear you, could you repeat that?"  I haven't gotten one in a while but remember it clearly.

I've gotten similar ones to that, too. Robo-bots that only seem to understand "Yes" or "No" as direct responses. Again, one of the reasons I toy with them is to try to find out who's paying for the lead generation, since as you noted, tracking down the lead generator is sometimes difficult. If we can make life hell for the clients of the lead generators and drive their clients away, we can damage the lead generators.

This company? https://www.bbb.org/greater-san-francisco/bus ... aluma-ca-455731   Looks like they are telling the BBB that they aren't doing it. Or are they lying to the BBB to save face, and getting the complaints themselves to scrub their call list? Hard to tell. After all, I get mexican vacation scams using AmEx, Hilton, Marriott, Expedia, etc and they aren't involved.

On the franchise note - the parent company could be claiming innocence, but franchisee's are telemarketing.  I've seen this before with Dish Network. I was getting lots of junk faxes (back when I had a fax machine) from Disk Network franchisees, although not directly from Disk Network corporate...