Lockdowns reduce number of spam calls
Have you been missing something amid the lockdowns and stayathome orders? No, not human contact. Not even toilet paper. Robocalls. Industry experts say robocalls are way down — scam calls as well as nagging reminders from your credit card company to pay your bill. The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted millions of job losses, and scammers have not been immune.
YouMail, which offers a robocallblocking service, says 2.9 billion robocalls were placed in April in the United States, down from 4.1 billion in March and 4.8 billion in February. That’s a daily average of 97 million calls in April, down from 132 million in March and 166 million in April.
The main reason: Many global call centers have closed or are operating with fewer workers,
said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. While it may be odd to think of scams being run out of call centers rather than a dark, creepy basement or a garage, that’s often the case, particularly in countries such as India and the Philippines, experts said.
After a lockdown order went into effect in India in late March, “we saw the volume of calls basically halve the next day,” Quilici said.
That means scammers will probably be back in force once the call centers come back online. Steppedup enforcement from industry groups and the U.S. government could nibble around the edges of those call volumes when the scammers are back, however. In recent months, federal agencies have focused on going after the small telecom providers that were allowing calls from COVID19 scammers, citing the urgency of the pandemic.
And free blocking tools that were already in place on many people’s phones help them dodge unwanted calls, so it’s not clear how many have noticed the lower numbers of scam and telemarketing calls in the past couple months.
“What we do hear from consumers is call blocking tools are effective in reducing a significant number of robocalls, but some unwanted calls are going to slip through,” said Maureen Mahoney, a policy analyst with Consumer Reports.
The number of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about unwanted calls has been steadily decreasing since late 2018. It dropped by more than half in March from the year before, to 240,000. The Federal Communications Commission gets many fewer complaints overall, but says it saw that number fall by 50% in March, to 10,000, and by 60% in April, to 7,500.
None of which is to say that nuisance calls and phone scams and texts have disappeared.
“While reports of robocalls are way down overall, we’re now hearing about callers invoking the COVID19 pandemic to pretend to be from the government, or making illegal medical or health care pitches,” an FTC blog post declared in midApril.
And Mahoney predicts that unwanted calls will pick up again, and it won’t just be scammers back in action.
With so many people out of work and behind on their bills, debt collectors will be relentlessly badgering them to pay soon enough, she said.