In September, Americans received over 4.2 billion robocalls. That’s about 140 million a day.
Now, that is a drop from August, but not for the reasons you would hope. There are only 30 days in September.
“September has a holiday with Labor Day and August doesn’t. That’s another 3% of robocalls, because the robocalls tend to take those days off,” said Alex Kolisi, CEO of the robocall blocking app Youmail.
Kolisi says the type of calls going out changes during the year.
‘’We’re starting to see student loan fraud amped up because, you know, the $10,000 forgiveness,” said Kolisi. “So they’re pretending they need information to make that happen. We’re seeing a lot of debt reduction calls that are problematic.
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“And I think the worst one right now, in my opinion, are the utility scams. These scammers are calling people up saying you’re going to be disconnected in the next half hour if you don’t pay, you know, $200 or $300 or whatever it is right away.”
Instead of instructing the victims to send a check to the utility company, the scammer pressures them to buy a gift card, often while staying on the phone as they drive to the store and then give the scammer the numbers over the phone.
Kolisi, says he sees signs that bad robocalls could someday go the way of bad spam emails that don’t bother us as much anymore.
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“Seeing technology improve it. We’re seeing consumers use third party apps to block calls so they don’t have to make those decisions. We’re seeing consumers not calling numbers back automatically without doing research,” said Kolisi
And remember, don’t engage with the scammer. If someone doesn’t start talking immediately after you say hello, hang up, you may get some enjoyment in telling them off, but it only tells other robocallers that your number is in service.
