You pick up the phone and hear: “We tried to reach you regarding your vehicle’s extended warranty. It’s a pre-recorded message, and it asks you to press a number or stay on the line.
Do not fall into the trap. It’s probably a scam.
More than 2 million individuals consumer complaints have been filed within the past eight years with the Consumer Help Center of the Federal Communications Commissionwho handles a wide range of telecommunications services and billing issues.
Spam calls are the main source of these complaints.
According to a USA TODAY analysis, at least 55% of all reports filed with the FCC are due to spam calls, including telemarketing and robocalls.
See if someone complained about a number
If you don’t see a data finder below, click here.
The searchable database above reflects 808,342 unwanted calls reported to the FCC over the past eight years.
These account for only 60% of all unwanted call complaints, as many phone customers failed to report a number from caller ID. Taking into account repetitions for the same telephone line, the database contains 551,345 unique numbers.
Being listed in the database does not necessarily mean that a caller is useless. The FCC does not investigate or resolve these individual complaints, but rather uses them to help inform FCC enforcement and policy work.
Nevertheless, a robocall trying to sell something through consumers’ wireless or landline phones is still illegal unless the company has obtained written or oral permission from them. There are only a few exceptions such as emergency calls regarding danger to life or safety that are made to wireless or landline numbers, or market research or survey calls via landline numbers only .
More unwanted call reports are kept by the Federal Trade Commissionwhich keeps a register of do not call numbers and receives complaints.
Who calls?
“Most of these spam calls are from scammers trying to scam people and calling on behalf of the IRS, DHS and different companies or people selling unwanted services like car warranties,” Ragib Hasan said. , tenured associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. at the University of Alabama at Birmingham whose research focuses on cloud computing and system security.
Since 2015, the FCC has received an annual average of 171,223 complaints of unwanted phone calls. The main reason for these complaints is robo-calls for car warranty renewals. These calls often included specific information about the user’s car and warranty that made the call legitimate, according to the FCC website.
Other consumer complaints received by the FCC related to lawsuits and criminal charges, fraudulent calls, phishing of social security numbers, and calls related to insurance or health care.
Many of these robocalls come from overseas. In 2021, the Industry Traceback
Group reported that 65% of voice service providers identified as transmitting
robocalls were either overseas-based providers or gateway providers.
“Scam calls often originate overseas and are routed through shady telecommunications services,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor at Princeton University appointed to the Department of Computer Science.
How many calls are we talking about?
In addition to the FCC, the Federal Trade Commission receives complaints about spam calls. Complaints received by either agency are just the tip of the iceberg.
Most individuals never file a violation complaint with the FCC or FTC DoNotCall registry,” Hasan said. “Either they don’t know the complaints process or they find it complicated.
The Federal Trade Commission tracking scams by imposters shows that from last January to the third quarter of 2022, it received 229,494 fraud reports by phone call, with nearly $590 million in lost money.
FTCs Do not call register Allows users to save their numbers to stop sales calls from real businesses. After the number is on the registry for 31 days, users can report unwanted commercial calls. The Registration received 935 complaints per 100,000 people from October 2021 to September 2022, and more than 60% of them were robocalls.
YouMail, a private company that provides robocall blocking software, has created a Index of robocalls which estimates monthly robocall volume It reported 4.3 billion robocalls in December alone. This equates to 136.6 million calls per day and an average of 13 calls per person.
How to block unwanted calls and robocalls
An FCC tip sheet tells people, “If you answer the phone and the caller – or a recording – asks you to press a button to stop receiving calls, you should just hang up.”
The government-approved way to stop spam calls from legitimate businesses is to add your name to the FTC name. Do not call register.
Experts also recommend looking into call blocking tools like YouMail and RoboKiller.
Your life in data: Consult crucial databases that can help you make day-to-day decisions
Why are unwanted calls dangerous?
Recorded phone calls don’t reach random people, experts say.
“Some of these campaigns are extremely targeted,” said Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail, a private company that provides robocall blocking software. “Medicare robocall scams target people 65 and older, student loan scammers tended to call 25-45 year olds, and sometimes they may even have specific lists of people who purchased a particular medical device. for example.”
Experts agree that scammers are likely to identify potential victims by scouring the Internet and looking for lists of people with something in common. They tend to target vulnerable people and use psychological tricks to play with their insecurities and rip them off.
“Fraudulent calls disproportionately target vulnerable populations, and I believe the most dangerous spam calls are those that target a specific demographic,” said Christian Wartchow, CEO of CyberSecure IT Solutions, which serves southwest Florida. “We see a huge number of elderly victims every week receiving calls from impostors posing as Amazon or Spectrum agents stealing personal information.”
What is the FCC doing about it?
The FCC has been trying to crack down on spam calls for years now. The agency has taken aggressive enforcement action against telemarketers for caller ID spoofing and apparently illegal robocalls. Additionally, agency regulators have required telecommunications services to implement forms of call authentication and block calls from non-compliant services.
In 2017, the FCC allowed voice service providers to block certain calls that appear to come from “invalid, unassigned, or unused numbers.” Two years later, the PLOT Act passed, requiring each provider to file a robocall mitigation plan and to verify that the caller ID information transmitted with each call matches the caller’s actual phone number.
“FCC has done a lot, and we’ve already seen scam calls go down a bit, which is good,” Quilici said.
But the threat remains strong, Quillici said, “because the scammers are getting smarter and the calls are much more targeted.”
“Consumers,” he said, “must take the necessary steps to protect themselves.”
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