Hey, maybe Fuck Off wants free stickers mailed to them.

TIL

I went down a brief rabbit hole on the zip+4 and the IMb (intelligent mailer barcode). The +4 was originally a local division inside a single zipcode, like a neighborhood or mail route. +4 and the barcode was then called POSTNET -- decommissioned and now upgraded barcode encoding to IMb, which can contain like 2000 bits of data. The zip +4 technically now has a length of 11 digits, and is inside a IMb barcode.

Conclusion, barcodes have sensitive data too. ~✍️

edit add: i wanted to see if my phone's barcode app could scan too see if OP's post office really calls him Mr. Off, but it cant natively read mailer codes and I fell asleep and the rabbit hole ended.

Surely the last 4 digits don't point to an exact house. I'm fairly certain my zip code has more than 9999 houses. It does seem like it would get you pretty close though.

1-8-5-0-5 dash 7-4-2-7

Neighborhood pride

Same here, but the name is "Sierra". I've had the same phone number for 25 years

I still get a load of spammy texts directed to the prior user of my #, and pretty clearly they're almost all produced by simple automation. But even with live callers, I believe many companies have automated a lot of that process as well. So as with email spam (etc), it might take surprisingly little effort to produce the call. So it can still be worth it for them, statistically, to harass you.

Could be that by blocking you let them know it's an active number, and anything with a pulse on the other side of the phone is a potential lick