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

[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

[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.

Telcos don't care

[orev]

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.

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.