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.

Scammers are flooding the United States with Chinese-language robocalls, causing major headaches from coast to coast.

The plague of robocalls is getting worse. Consumers received more than 18 billion in 2017, a 75 percent increase from the year before. They are the number one consumer complaint to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It receives more than 200,000 protests a year, and robocalls make up roughly 60 percent of all complaints to the FCC.

Remember when phone calls meant people wanted to talk to you about something other than lowering your interest rates? These days, the phone rings so often with recorded robocall messages—You qualify! You owe! You’ve won!—answering feels like a hazard.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a $229,500 award that a Texas woman had won from Time Warner Cable Inc for harassing her with 153 robocalls after she told it to stop.

If you live in Washington, D.C., or another U.S. metropolitan area, you may have noticed that you’re on the receiving end of a barrage of Chinese-language robo-calls. The calls bring alarming news, and federal regulators and law-enforcement agencies say the automated messages are part of a nationwide scam targeting Chinese communities in the United States.