Robocalls target fears about loans, insurance

PHILADELPHIA — There’s a good chance the next caller on your cell phone will try to take your money or steal your identity.

This grim statistic comes from First Orion, an Arkansas-based call management company that estimates nearly 30 percent of all cell-phone calls came from scammers this year. The firm predicts nearly half of all mobile calls will be fraudulent in 2019.

The robocall scams often play on anxiety and greed, offering suspiciously cheap health insurance plans, “free” vacations, deferred student-loan payments, and, in one case, a job at Amazon that you can do from home.

The scam-call surge is driven by technology that has made it cheaper to place robocalls and easier to mask the scammers’ identities. “Neighborhood spoofing,” for example, allows scammers to place calls that appear to come from local numbers. First Orion predicts 9 in 10 scam calls will come from a familiar area code in 2019.

“These scammers are really sophisticated,” said Gavin Macomber, First Orion’s senior vice president of marketing and business development. “They do A-B testing like us marketers do it in the legitimate business world. If they try something and it works, they’ll keep doing it.”

The robocall epidemic has gotten so bad that the telecom industry is working on a fix that would verify the numbers of incoming calls as authentic and not spoofed, so consumers can trust their caller IDs again.