April was a mixed month for robocalls: Overall, calls were up compared to March, but scam robocalls declined by a significant amount, according to a new YouCall report.
The overall increase was 3% and reached almost 5 billion calls. That was the most since August 2023. The report says that the total for the first four months of the year was approximately 18.9 billion robocalls. That was an increase of 11.39% compared to the first four months of 2024.
Other metrics were up as well. The April average was 165 million robocalls per day, which equates to 1,910 robocalls per second. That was up 6.5% from March’s average of 155 million robocalls per day and 1,794 robocalls per second. That represents a 12.3% increase on a year-over-year basis from April 2024.
The news is better concerning scam calls. YouMail reported that there were approximately 620 million such calls, a decline of 8.6% compared to March. It also represented 13% of robocalls, a 1% decline.
The report said that there were 1.34 billion notification robocalls. This represented a 7.3% increase in total calls and a 1% increase (to 27%) in share compared to March. Payment reminders, at 930 million, were down .5% and had a 19% share, a decline of 1%. Telemarketing robocalls rose 6.5% to 2.06 billion. It was by far the largest category — 41% — and rose 1% in share.
For the first quarter of 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimated a loss of $280 million to scams started with a phone call. Combined with YouMail’s estimate of 1.9 billion scam calls during the quarter, an average reported loss of approximately 15 cents per call can be extrapolated. This suggests that, during April, at least $90 million to $100 million of scam losses started with a phone call.
“We’re seeing robocalls continue to trend higher in 2025, after a long stretch of being stable or trending down,” YouMail CEO Alex Quilicisaid in a press release about the report. “The robocall problem clearly hasn’t been solved, and there’s still a need for apps and services that protect consumers.”
In March, U.S. consumers received 7.9% more robocalls than received in February, according to the previous report from YouMail. The context, however, is that March is three days longer than February (except during leap years).
Late last month, in an effort to curb robocalls, the FCC released a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to expedite a fix to a shortcoming in the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication framework that can wipe the “digital fingerprint” upon which the system relies if the call passes through a non-IP technology.
