If You Think Phone Spam Is Bad in the US, Try Picking Up in Argentina
More than one out of every three calls to Americans from numbers not in their contacts lists were spam in the fourth quarter of last year—and we can take some relative pride in that, because many other countries have a much bigger phone-spam problem.
That not-great, not-terrible 34.9% spam-call figure comes from a report released Thursday(Opens in a new window) by Hiya(Opens in a new window), a Seattle firm that provides call-screening services to telecom firms and telecom consumers. Its apps tracked a total of 7.5 billion spam calls worldwide in Q4, with the peak week being Oct. 17-22 when it flagged 655 million spam calls.
The good news, such as it is, for Americans is that almost of our spam calls fall into the “nuisance” category, with outright fraud representing only 0.9% of all calls from non-contact numbers. And Hiya observed a more than 50% decline in what may be the most loathed sort of spam call, the extended-auto-warranty robocall.
Hiya’s report credits regulatory moves by the Federal Communications Commission, which last year took such actions as proposing a $300 million fine against one warranty-robocall scammer and ordering voice providers to stop accepting traffic from a telecom provider it found to be abetting these robocalls.
With car-warranty spammers getting driven to the junkyard, Hiya found that healthcare scams now represent the top type of fraud call in the US.
“Scammers may be selling a bogus healthcare policy or medical device, or they may be trying to obtain a person’s Medicare number to bill the government for procedures that never happened,” the report notes. “Medicare scams increased late in 2022 during the open enrollment period.”
Other countries have a much worse problem. The report shows
Read more on pcmag.com
