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

Baloney

[Major Blud]

unwanted robo-calls represent a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies

Hardly.....isn't it fully within the capabilities of the telecom companies to stop third-party caller ID spoofing?

Re:Baloney

[radarskiy]

"a way for a VOIP system to register the IP address with the phone company when it makes the phone call "

The phone company knows who to bill when they complete a phone call. Just impose a near zero call completion fee and hold the phone company liable if they can't figure out who to bill it to upstream.

On average, most callers will net close to 0. In bulk, the net calls could be rounded down to the nearest 1,000 to avoid the effort of chasing the small fry. All that's left are the big fish, and the phone companies have their incentive to keep track of who they are.