And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.
Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.
Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.
Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.
The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.
There are exceptions for nonprofits, political campaigns and surveys and to be honest those do seem to be the nature of all the non-scam unsolicited calls I receive (and of course they are somewhat difficult to distinguish from scams anyway), based on the voicemails they sometimes leave, so it may well actually be working.
I suppose many people would wonder what the difference is between a legitimate caller you don't want and a fake one.
If you're the sort of person that is too polite to just hang up and you might get hooked by a scam caller because you let them talk to you, then it's a big difference