By nature, criminals who choose to commit their crimes over the internet are on a mission to find new and creative ways to simultaneously defraud both consumers and companies. It doesn’t help that traditional contact center authentication methodologies are easily circumvented by social engineering, which enables fraudsters to prosper.

4.1 billion. That’s the number of robocalls made to American consumers last month, according to the robocall index operated by YouMail, a robocall blocking service.

Rebecca Schulte, 24, was at her apartment in West Hollywood, California, when she received a call from a familiar area code. She picked up.

The Federal Trade Commission has strict rules that, in its own words, make “virtually all” telemarketing robocalls illegal. But we’ve still seen the number of complaints about robocalls explode over the last few years. On Tuesday, the FTC announced it’s doing something about it by suing some kingpins who allegedly facilitated billions of unwanted calls.

That phone call that appears to be from your neighbor but turns out to be a sales pitch or worse, a scam, is the latest ruse by robocallers.

It’s called neighbor spoofing and the calls seem to be surging, particularly in the 210 area code.

If you've picked up the phone only to hear the start of an automatic recording, you're not alone. Roughly 16.3 billion of these calls have been placed just in the first five months of 2018, according to the YouMail Robocall Index.

The telephone swept into Americans’ lives in the first decades of the 20th century. At first, no one knew exactly how to telephone. Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to start conversations by saying, “Ahoy-hoy!” AT&T tried to prevent people from saying “hello,” arguing in Telephone Engineer magazine that it was rude.

“I AM not the kingpin of robocalling that is alleged.” So Adrian Abramovich, a telemarketer from Florida, assured American senators in April. Accused of making nearly 100m illegal “robocalls” in 2016 as part of a campaign to sell discounted holidays, Mr Abramovich has denied criminal wrongdoing. Nonetheless, on May 10th the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), America’s telecoms regulator, fined him $120m, the largest penalty in the agency’s history.

Robocall scams have found new prey. The latest aim at the Chinese immigrant population by preying on their fears about their status in the U.S.

English speakers who get the calls have no idea what's being said. But Mandarin speakers who answer would hear news that their immigration status may be in jeopardy.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has accepted recommendations for an industry-developed call authentication system intended to stop the use of Caller ID spoofing from the North American Numbering Council (NANC.)

If you live in a part of the country that has a large Chinese immigrant population, you may have recently received a robocall in Mandarin — or even several of them. The calls seem to be blanketing certain phone exchanges without regard to the national origin of the recipients. Presumably, this is how the New York Police Department ended up on the call list.

In a massive strike, the Federal Communications Commission issued a $120 million fine on a massive robocall spoofing operation it deemed a threat to public safety.

A New York lawmaker is looking to put an end to those obnoxious robocalls that interrupt your work flow, take away from your time with family and friends and even scams that attempt to steal your identity.