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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.
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.
Telcos have 0 incentive to resolve this issue. They get paid every time a call traverses their lines, and they desperately want the wireline phone system to die so they can get out of regulatory obligations, maintenance costs, and union obligations. The only chance they have to allow this to happen is if customers get so annoyed with the service that they cancel, and when enough people cancel they can make the case to shut it down.
All I had to do was change how I answer the phone. When a person answers the phone, the recipient usually says something like, "Hello?" Most robocallers wait for that and interpret that as being a human on the other end of the line. At that point, it spews out its spiel like, "Your warranty is about to expire on your car. This is definitely not the last time you will hear from us. Press 1 to talk to a human who wants to scam you out of your money. Press 2 to not be removed from the list and you will get another call from us in the next 48 hours once you've had a chance to think about how much you really do want to be scammed."
However, if the person doesn't say anything, the system will wait 15-30 seconds and then automatically hang up. When it hangs up, two things happen: You never hear the scammer's automated message and...the phone number is removed from the calling list, which causes the robocaller to cease making calls. Repeat that process a half dozen times and the robocalls drop off like a rock after that. Pressing buttons or anything constituting an "action" tells the system that there's someone there. Not doing anything causes the system to think nothing is there and that its time is just being wasted. There are plenty of suckers out there, so removing the unresponsive phone number just cleans up the calling list to increase the likelihood of finding a person they can scam/con/whatever. Putting a number on the Do Not Call registry is an open invite to receive robocalls because that means those numbers most definitely want to receive automated phone calls.