Americans Received Over 26 Billion Spam Calls Last Year

You’re not the only one that has to put up with spam calls and texts. Countless users in the United States have been bombarded by texts and calls that they don’t want. A new report reveals that Americans received some 26.3 billion robocalls in 2018 alone which is a staggering 46 percent surge from 2017.

Hiya, a spam monitoring service, has been analyzing the robocalls and it finds that most people have just given up on picking up calls. The volume of robocalls continues to grow on a yearly basis even though the Do Not Call Registry was established over a decade ago back in 2003.

It analyzed a subset of 11 billion calls monthly and found that only 52 percent of all calls that Americans receive on their phones are answered. This results in almost half the calls being sent to voicemail. When they receive a call from an unidentified number, this statistic rises with more than three in four calls being left unanswered. A person receives 114 calls per month on average out of which more than half are from numbers that are not saved in their contacts. These may include spam or scam calls.

Robocallers have been working their way around the protections afforded to users by masking their spam calls with local numbers that appear genuine. This makes it more difficult to detect such calls. However, there are quite a few services available on iOS and Android that let users detect masked calls as well.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones