Plagued by robocalls? 26 billion spam calls in 2018, quarter from scammers

[steven36]

The number of robocalls to US consumers increased massively last year.

 

 

Consumers in the US received a whopping 26.3 billion robocalls in 2018, which was 46 percent more than that the total number of robocalls in 2017, according to Hiya, maker of a caller ID app.

 

The company estimates that people received on average 10 unwanted calls per month and that 25 percent of all robocalls are scams. The top three categories of unwanted calls in the US include general spam, fraud and telemarketing. 

 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has outlined plans to combat the problem of robocalls in the US. FCC chairman Ajit Pai in November fired off a letter to carriers demanding that the industry implements a call-authentication system by this year. The system aims to combat caller ID spoofing. 

 

He's pushing carriers to immediately adopt the Signature-based Handing of Asserted Information Using Tokens (Shaken) and the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited standards. 

 

Carriers would then 'sign' calls originating from their network, which would be validated by other carriers before reaching a phone. 

 

According to YouMail, another robocall-blocking service, the situation in 2018 was even worse, with the company last week reporting an estimated 47.8 billion robocalls in the US last year. Robocalls in 2018 were up 56.8 percent from the estimated 30.5 billion robocalls in 2017. 

 

Its data found that 37 percent of all robocalls were scams related to health insurance, student loans, easy money scams, tax scams, travel scams, business scams and warranty scams. The remaining 60 percent of robocalls were legitimate, including telemarketing calls, reminders and alerts. 

 

 

The FCC and the Federal Trade Commission both cite unwanted and illegal robocalls as their top source of complaints. The FTC received 7.1 million consumer complaints about robocalls in 2017, up from 5.3 million in 2016. The FCC says it gets about 200,000 complaints each year. 

 

The number of robocalls have increased over the years despite over 200 million US consumers have registered on the Do Not Call Registry.  

 

 

Hiya's research sets out the US area codes most targeted by spammers.

 

Source