Despite recent moves by regulators seeking to stem the tide of annoying robocalls, there was a 4% robocalls increase in September compared to August. September robocalls reached 3.8 billion, according to a new report from YouMail.
Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules requiring the implementation of caller ID authentication using technical standards known as “STIR/SHAKEN,” which are designed to further the FCC’s efforts to protect consumers against malicious caller ID “spoofing,” often used during robocall scam campaigns to trick consumers into answering their phones.
However, in September, Americans received an average of nearly 127 million calls per day, which equates to some 1,469 calls every second. The numbers for August were 118.3 million calls/day and 1,370 calls/second.
According to YouMail, the U.S. is on a pace for 50 billion robocalls this year. As bad as that figure is, it’s down from the nearly 58.5 billion robocalls last year.
“Robocalls continue to grow more slowly than we expected as the world reopens,” said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici, in a prepared statement about the robocalls increase. “The issue is that if the rate of calls per day keeps growing at 5% to 10% per month, robocalls will become a more and more noticeable problem throughout the rest of the year.”
A majority (60%) of the calls – 2.3 billion – were scams and telemarketing calls. Some robocalls, such as appointment reminders for doctor’s appointment, are legitimate.
But those aren’t the robocalls that most consumers receive. According to YouMail, car warranty scam calls have been the most common type of illegal robocall type for the last three months. The next most frequent category of calls is medical scams. Another increasingly popular category of robocalls is imposter scams from fraudsters pretending to be the Internal Revenue Service or Social Security Administration or another government agency.
