FTC Reports 50% Drop in Unwanted Call Complaints Since 2021 36
The Federal Trade Commission reported Friday that the number of consumer complaints about unwanted telemarketing phone calls has dropped over 50% since 2021, continuing a trend that started three years ago. From a report: This year, the FTC has received 1.1 million reports regarding robocalls, down from 1.2 million one year before 2023 and from more than 3.4 million in 2021. According to this year's National Do Not Call Registry Data Book -- which provides the most recent data on robocall complaints together with a complete state-by-state analysis -- the highest number of consumer complaints targeted unwanted calls about medical and prescription issues, with more than 170,000 reports (most of them robocalls) received until September 30, 2024.
Spam calls falling? No. (Score:2)
Not any more.
Seems like spam calls were dropping, but in the last month they've skyrocketed-- I think we've been getting about five a day the last week or so..
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FTC Failure: believing the numbers are reliable. (Score:4, Insightful)
The FTC bragging that they're getting half as many reports as in 2021... that they only got 170,000 reports in 2024... is a joke. It doesn't mean they're stopping the spam calls, it just means people gave up on a useless reporting system.
Think about it. No scammer's number shows up on your phone anymore; they're ALWAYS faking the caller ID, either impersonating a government office or doing 4- or 5-digit nearest-neighbor spoofs. Almost everyone under 70 years old has learned by now that Caller ID can't be trusted.
Since the Caller ID number is wrong, reporting the number it gave is no good, and both the "Do Not Call List" and the FTC's reporting form are useless. You get absolutely no benefit from wasting your time making the report.
Cell phone companies started, THANKFULLY, to implement call filtering functions as well... if the spammer didn't get through your Android "answering mode" and just hung up, are you going to waste the time reporting them to the FTC? Or do you just shrug, and move on to other things?
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it just means people gave up on a useless reporting system.
^^^ The Correct Answer ^^^^
But don't worry. Trump will just eliminate the FTC. Problem solved.
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No, it's broader than that. People have stopped answering. I know lots of people that refuse to answer their phone unless it's from someone on their contacts list. Unfortunately my business phone has to answer calls, so we get 30-50 scam calls per day.
The problem is trivial to solve. Make spoofing a felony and turn off India's internet.
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Political spam? Re:Spam calls falling? No. (Score:1)
If you take out political spam what do the numbers look like?
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If you take out political spam what do the numbers look like?
My political spam has been mostly text messages.
But, a reasonable hypothesis is that the spamming industry ramped up for the election, and now that the election spam drive is over, the industry has spare capacity that they're now using for other spam.
Same here (Score:2)
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No, but people have given up complaining about them. I think I average over 50/day.
Complaint fatigue (Score:5, Insightful)
If you complain and it doesn't help, eventually you give up complaining.
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yup,
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If you complain and it doesn't help, eventually you give up complaining.
I think it has more to do with mobile phone OSes getting better at identifying and rejecting spam calls.
My experience is with Google Pixel devices, but I find that 75% of unwanted calls just get silently rejected and for the other 25% I see that I don't know the caller, hit the "Screen call" button and before the screening system is halfway through its spiel, the caller hangs up. Bottom line, I never actually receive any robocalls. I'm sure other devices are doing similar things.
People Lost Confidence that Anything Will Be Done (Score:4, Interesting)
My solution: you need a federal permit to make more than 100 calls a day, subject for review.
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I like that idea, but the real problem is that our phone system(s) is too easy to hack and inject spoofed ID's. The wrong people would get punished.
Otherwise a given junk call could easily be tracked back the perps. Our phone systems being that leaky is also a national security threat, not just "interrupting family dinner" stuff.
XiPutin could cause chaos during an invasion or national disaster to weaken us.
How will that help? (Score:2)
My solution: you need a federal permit to make more than 100 calls a day
Most spam calls are already illegal. Adding a new law for them to break seems unlikely to help and instead is likely to result in random people getting arrested for accidentally exceeding the quota. Plus many spam calls originate outside the country they are calling probably to make it harder to get prosecuted since they may be breaking local laws but the complaints will go to another country's government.
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I don't know if it is FTC, but phone calls on the mobile phone almost always are marked as "telemarketer" or "suspected spam", without my having to do anything. On my mother's land line I had to enable verification which was off by default (stupid AT&T) and then the vast majority of calls were marked in similar ways. It's still annoying to have to spend time to look and see if the call is worth answering, but it's a marked improvement.
But also after this happened for my mother's phone, the calls slowl
It's probably the Stir/Shaken implementation (Score:2)
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Well, from where I sit (NH), we're getting just as many spam calls from forged caller IDs (both in-state and out-of-state) as we did 8 years ago. It might be more expensive for the bad guys, but they are CLEARLY paying the cost. And I'm not answering every bleeping call just to try to guess the identity of the spammers, to send in complaints to the Department of Not Taking Any Action. And I poked both senators "Can you ask the FTC ad FCC to document what actions they've taken in response to consumer comp
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Not my experience (Score:1)
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That's because *the calls are coming from inside the house*!
yeah they hid the form (Score:2, Informative)
The form is now harder to find and also harder to fill out.
They solved the problem by making it harder to solve
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It's right there where it's been for years. https://www.donotcall.gov/ [donotcall.gov]
And how much of that is fatigue? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Eventually the calls just don't stop and people give up reporting since it seems to accomplish nothing.
I think it has more to do with the fact a lot of handsets now identify potentially spam calls, certainly my Android handset in the UK does. And that people have finally realised they shouldn't pick up unkown numbers.
Newer handsets are touting "AI" to answer the call for you and identify the caller.
Figures (Score:3)
When you don't do anything about them people eventually stop calling to complain since it's a waste of time.
Regex filtering (Score:2)
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Is one of them your area code? Most of the spam calls I get are from my own area code. Conversely some of the legitimate calls I get are from other area codes.
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By the same logic (Score:2)
Callers get fatigue because many people don't answer the phone if there is an unidentified phone number on their caller ID. So spam calls are getting less an less effective.
People just gave up reporting (Score:2)
Only because we have learned it has no value (Score:2)
Nothing happened. And the number of calls have increased to such an extent that I could never take the time to report them all. I am lucky if I only get 10 in a day on my cell phone.
And that does not include the "political" robocalls that are expressly allowed (WTF!)
So, the statistic is going down because people are just too frustrated with the lack of results from reporti