disguising your phone number

[Slade]

I find the imagination of those trying to disguise their phone number to be interesting, but I suspect the effort may be excessive and possibly derailing responses to your posts. The Bots that are skimming for phone numbers really can't see beyond one inserted alpha character, so you could simply have a phone number of 509-12three-4567 and you should be safe.

Bob
Twisp

[drewsky]

It's definitely possible for them to see beyond the single alpha example you've given, but I think you're probably right in that the most common aren't usually able to parse weird and complex patterns (that as you said also become much less readable to other people). I think it's more common for scammers to get numbers (probably connected to names and other personal info) from breached data but the low level scraping certainly still happens.

Another issue is that plain text numbers get indexed in search engine results, but sharing them in public in the first place kind of assumes this.