Consumers’ trust in phone calls slipped over the past year as scams increased and AI-generated voices made fraudulent calls harder to identify, according to call-protection company Hiya’s annual State of the Call 2026 report. Tracking the phone call experiences of over 12,000 consumers across six countries, the report saw confidence eroding across the markets it surveyed.
The report — conducted between December 2025 and January 2026 — found that 34% of people globally said their overall trust in phone calls had decreased over the previous 12 months because of scams.
In the United States, consumers fielded an average of 10 unwanted calls each week, a level Hiya said had pushed many people to ignore unfamiliar numbers altogether. The findings suggested that unwanted calls had become a routine feature of daily life for most consumers.
Artificial intelligence has compounded the problem. Nearly 1 in 3 respondents globally reported receiving an AI deepfake phone call scam in the past year, in which the technology was used to mimic a voice the recipient trusted. Hiya said that shift helped explain why consumers are even more cautious in their efforts to avoid scams.
The financial stakes were also notable. The report found that 1 in 12 Americans lost money to a phone scam over the year, with an average loss of $682. Hiya said the combination of rising volumes and more convincing impersonations had left consumers answering fewer calls overall, including legitimate outreach from the businesses trying to reach them.
“Trust in the phone is eroding, and people are answering fewer calls and missing the ones that matter,” said Alex Algard, CEO of Hiya. He described giving consumers a clear warning before a suspected scam call as the way to reverse the trend.
The Hiya data arrived against a backdrop of persistently high automated calling in the United States. A recent YouMail report found that telemarketing and scam phone calls made up roughly 60% of all robocalls in April, even though overall robocall volume had fallen sharply from a year earlier.
