A new report from voice intelligence provider Hiya says that it flagged more than 105 million suspected spam calls every day — a total of more than 9.7 billion — during the third quarter of the year.
The company said the most common global threat is from calls posing as being from banks or credit card companies. According to the report, the second most common exploit is spam calls purporting to be from Amazon. The calls generally say that there is a problem with a card linked to the target’s account or are attempts to gain personal information in the guise of completing an order or to facilitate delivery.
“Quarter-on-quarter, our data shows fraud call rates continue to rise, Hiya president Kush Parikh said in a press release about the report. “Despite growing awareness of the risks, fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated, fueled in part by the latest technology to adapt their tactics. Examples of robocalls are plentiful, demonstrating that it is becoming easier — and less time intensive — for scammers to spam call victims in high volumes.”
The company’s Q3 2024 Global Call Threat Report found that spam call rates for people in the United States have increased from an average of 11 to 13 per month in the third quarter.
Medicare scams continue to dominate and are likely to increase during its open enrollment period in the fourth quarter. Scammers’ goal in this case is to get valuable data such as Medicare numbers that can be used to falsely bill the US government.
The Hiya report also said that insurance scam calls ranked second. Fraudsters often impersonated IRS tax agents, Amazon and Google representatives and police personnel. These often are robocalls.
The spam call trends identified by the report are consistent. In August, Hiya found that there were 20 billion spam calls worldwide during the first half of the year. The top four were related to Medicare, insurance, health, and tax-related spam calls.
