alt Hacker NewsSomebody at some point is purchasing them, probably not the spammers/scammers themselves.
It's very unlikely anybody is placing spam/scam calls with regular cell phones when VoIP numbers are easy and cheap to get, and when VoIP systems are far easier to manage.
You would think that someone is getting real cell phone numbers, for the same reason scammers value residential IPs rather than data center IPs.