U.S. February Robocall Count Stays Consistent with Past Months

Robocalls are a nuisance to U.S. consumers. From telemarketing to political calls, many find them to be intrusive, annoying and disruptive to their daily lives. That said, within the robocall umbrella are scam calls that look to target U.S. consumers.

As a result, there are efforts to combat them through legislation and technological solutions, but these efforts don’t appear to be making a huge dent in what is essentially a never-ending fight.

Looking at February, U.S. consumers received just over 4.3 billion robocalls, staying within the range of 4.2 billion and 4.7 billion calls per month since last August, according to the YouMail Robocall Index. The February volume did mark a 4% decrease from January's volume.

"Robocall volumes have been very steady for nearly a year," said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici (News - Alert).

And steady is right. With Americans receiving 51.5 billion robocalls the past 12 months, according to the index, doing the math puts the monthly average around that 4.2 billion and 4.3 billion range.

Of those 4.3 billion robocalls in February, 1.9 billion are marked as unwanted scam and telemarketing calls, about the same as January. Consumers should note that some calls initially viewed as telemarketing are recognized as illegal telemarketing or scam calls, so it's important to measure the overall quantity of scam and spam calls combined.

As a reminder, a scam call is clearly illegal or fraudulent behavior (such as a call from an enterprise imposter or one that has a spoofed caller ID). STIR/SHAKEN continues its fight against robocall campaigns based on spoofed IDs to help drive down the number of obvious scam calls.

But consumers also need to take the initiative to protect themselves. YouMail (News - Alert), for example, blocks unwanted robocallers by making sure the user's phone doesn't ring and then plays an out-of-service message that leads them to think they dialed an invalid number.

"Consumers still need to protect themselves with robocall blocking apps like YouMail, since this problem is remarkably stubborn, despite the efforts of enforcement, carriers and others," said Quilici.

YouMail is a free robocall blocking app and call protection service for mobile phones that protects consumers, enterprises and carriers from harmful phone calls. The above figures, provided by YouMail, are determined by extrapolating from the robocall traffic attempting to get through to YouMail's millions of active users.