Study Finds Unwanted Robocalls up 49% in One Year

Despite ongoing efforts by industry and regulators to stem the flood of unwanted robocalls, a Transaction Network Services report has found that the number of such robocalls jumped by 49% from 2018 to 2019, and grew even faster in the second half of 2019 than they did in the first. The average consumer received 325 unwanted robocalls in 2019, and Americans as a whole now receive more than 300 million of those calls each day.

As the volume of calls continues to increase, scammers are also going all-out in tactics that try to fool users into answering their calls. So-called “neighbor spoofing,” in which a recipient’s local exchange is spoofed, rose 40% year-over-year. Legitimate toll-free numbers are also being spoofed to disguise fraudulent calls, with high-risk calls from toll-free numbers more than doubling between 2018 to 2019 as robocall operations shifted from spoofing Voice over IP numbers to spoofing toll-free numbers. TNS found that they are “increasingly spoofing legitimate customer-care numbers from trusted brands to try to trick consumers.”