What to do about record setting robocalling
Excerpt: The IRS is coming to arrest you for tax evasion. A debt collector requires immediate payment. A hotel chain is offering a free vacation. Florida Power & Light will disconnect your service because of an overdue bill. Your credit card company is cutting your interest rate, or notifying you of a security breach. A doctor wants to sell you pills for chronic back pain at a discounted price.
In medieval times, the Black Plague descended on mankind. Today, we are consumed by an epidemic of robocalls.
The number of unwanted automated calls received by Americans has surged to 4 billion per month, according to the Federal Communications Commission. That’s about 1,543 calls per second. Scam calls have skyrocketed from 4 percent of all calls to mobile phones in 2016 to 29 percent in 2018, and are projected to reach 45 percent next year, according to First Orion, a company that provides call-blocking and management technology.
Bottom Line: You already knew robo-calling was bad and seemingly getting worse but now you have the latest numbers. What’s more, South Florida is the single most spammed metro in the country, so we have it worse than anyone due to our diverse demographics and the desire by scammers to take advantage of vulnerable people in South Florida. The biggest problem is figuring out how to stop it. There are paid services that can help, like the Nomorobo, mentioned in the story (but that’s only free for landlines) but my recommendation of a few years ago is still my recommendation of today. Mr. Number. I highly recommend Mr. Number for mobile devices. Not only is it free for mobile devices – looking up a number than attempted to call you to see if it’s legit or a scammer – but it will also reveal the type of scammer they are which can be helpful if you’d like to report them to the FTC if you’re on the Do Not Call Registry. The other nice feature with today’s mobile devices is how easy it is to block the number a scammer is calling from so it won’t be able to successfully reach you again. This is important because you don’t won’t to accidentally block legitimate numbers in a case of mistaken identity (I’ve seen/heard numerous accounts of people blocking numbers from legitimate vendors/businesses creating problems when they’re not able to reach you). It’s good to have the added layer of information to confirm your suspicions.
The problem is bad and is only projected to get worse, so it makes sense to do something to begin to manage the problem if you haven't already. Here’s the link for Mr. Number: https://mrnumber.com/