According to new data from First Orion, a call protection company, the amount of junk calls will reach 46% by mid-year 2019. And by the end of that year, the amount is projected to finally cross the halfway point, meaning that half of all calls will be spam.

The phone call in early June purporting to be from Chinese authorities was, in a word, alarming. The Massachusetts woman who answered it learned she may have been the victim of identity theft.

Racist robocalls targeting Andrew Gillum, the first black nominee for Florida governor from a major party, have been placed to residents from an out-of-state white supremacist entity.

(CNN)The paint on the road near a predominantly Latino community near Des Moines read, "Deport Illegals."

The sprayed-on sentiment didn't last the day, but some officials in the Iowa city are worried it's indicative of a simmering resentment for immigrants that has become more public recently.

Robocalls — those annoying, automated spam and scam messages — are on the rise.

So far in 2018, more than 16.3 billion spam phone calls have pestered people across the country, according to YouMail, a robocall watch­dog that offers free call-blocking software.

The recent bust of a large fraud and money laundering conspiracy highlights one key takeaway for you: Be wary of who is on the other end of your phone line — particularly if they claim to be the IRS.

Struggling retailer Sears has a lot on the line in a multimillion-dollar class-action settlement over unwanted robocalls offering free Caribbean cruises.

With stiff sentences for 21 conspirators last week in the United States and a round of indictments in India, the Justice Department says it has broken up what appeared to be the nation’s first large-scale, multinational telephone fraud operation.

Why can’t the government catch these guys? That was the sentiment echoed in my inbox over and over as those Internal Revenue Service (IRS) impersonation phone scams exploded. It felt painfully slow, but arrests were finally made in the United States and India. This week, many of those scammers were sentenced for their crimes.

It may be summer, but the bad guys aren’t taking a vacation. The Acting Inspector General of Social Security, Gale Stallworth Stone, has issued a warning about an ongoing phone scam from thieves pretending to be from the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Two dozen people have been sentenced for aiding in a massive call center scheme centered in India that tricked vulnerable people in the U.S. into giving up hundreds of millions of dollars, culminating what Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised as “first-ever” multi-jurisdiction takedown of India’s “call center scam industry.”

Big corporations are aggressively lobbying for the Trump administration to ease restrictions on the persistent interruptions.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has partnered with security firm SecureLogix to develop technology to defend against telephony denial-of-service attacks, which remain a significant threat to emergency call centers, banks, schools and hospitals.

Cybersecurity attacks happen all too often, and attackers are becoming more bold and sophisticated by disrupting critical phone systems and putting 911 emergency call centers at risk. Similar to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on critical online services, Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks render emergency systems unavailable by saturating them with bogus calls and potentially causing great harm to those who truly require urgent first responder attention.  

Robocalls have been on the rise in the United States: An estimated 4.1 billion robocalls were made nationwide in June alone, according to data compiled by YouMail, an app that aims to prevent robocalls by playing an out-of-service message from your phone. Since February this year, the number of robocalls made to phone users across the country has risen more than 40 percent, it says.