Americans Got 26.3 Billion Robocalls Last Year, Up 46 Percent From 2017 (washingtonpost.com)

Americans are now getting so many robo-calls on a regular basis that many are simply choosing not to answer the phone altogether. From a report: That's one big takeaway from a report [PDF] released Tuesday by Hiya, a Seattle-based spam-monitoring service that analyzed activity from 450,000 users of its app to determine the scope of unwanted robo-calling -- and how phone users react when they receive an automated call. Consistent with other analyses, Hiya's report found that the number of robo-calls is on the rise. Roughly 26.3 billion robo-calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers last year, Hiya said, up from 18 billion in 2017. One report last year projected that as many as half of all cellphone calls in 2019 could be spam.

While many businesses have legitimate purposes for using robo-calls -- think package delivery services, home maintenance technicians and banks -- unwanted robo-calls represent a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies. In its analysis of a month's worth of calling data, Hiya found that each of its app users reported an average of 10 unwanted robo-calls. Many more incoming calls, about 60 on average, were from unrecognized numbers or numbers not linked to a person in the recipient's address book.

Comments

Raise your hand if

[Anonymous Coward]

You thought the Drumpf administration was going to solve a real problem like this under Ajit Pai. Now, look around the room. Those people with their hands raised are fucking morons. You may put them down now.

Re:Baloney

[Archangel Michael]

It is, and it would break every VOIP system out there which can set its own Caller ID.

Double edge swords cut both ways.

Re:Baloney

[agent_blue]

Not really. The way Caller ID was originally implemented, the Caller ID information is transmitted along with the call as a set of ultrasonic tones, therefore any caller and set their caller-id number to whatever they want. This is useful if you are calling from an office that gets routed through a local switchboard.

Some kind of standard is being worked on, but it is a hard problem to implement with the current telepohny network was it exists today

see https://datatracker.ietf.org/w...

Re:Forget Net Neutrality

[bill_mcgonigle]

How did we end up with a government where no one on either side ever fixes anything?

You have a system where a large percentage of the rulers are psychopaths or sociopaths and they crave power which has to be given to them by voters and to get this they have to promise voters things that they never intend to deliver, and you expect them to get rid of things that they can dangle in front of voters, like stopping robocalls? The politically-desirable outcome is media coverage, not solutions to real problems.

It's a well-known secret that both parties have an agreement to slowly raise the minimum wage below the rate of inflation but to have a big media shit-storm every time to socially signal to "their" voters that they're being represented. The whole thing might be the biggest con in history.

I'm glad to have found a good call blocker that works on Pie; had to update my voicemail to say, "sorry, you're not on my contacts list." Government didn't solve this problem for me, nor did I ever expect that it would. Some dude called Vlad Lee did and he has a Play Store account.