September 15, 2016 9:40 AM
Atlanta Gets The Most Robocalls
People living in the 404 area code may be a little peeved. According to Jacques Couret at the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “The latest YouMail Robocall Index shows Atlanta’s 404 area code was the nation’s most robocalled area codes for the ninth straight month, with 49,362,000 robocalls in August.”
Roughly one in six phone numbers calling consumers is a “robocall.” Every time your phone rings, there’s a 17% chance it’s a robocall. It is campaign season, but before you go blaming political campaigns, you should know that most of those calls are either debt collection, scams or some combination. Full report here.
About Author
Mike Hassinger
4 Comments
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I get at least two a day, almost all are offers of loans for my business. If they are ever human I tell them I’ve been on the no-call list since its inception. I always block the number afterward. I have over 100 blocked numbers on my AT&T account. I’ve done the complaint thing but they just keep coming. I wish there was a way I could take them to my local small claims court for $500.00 a pop for each one.
Maybe Andrew knows of a legal remedy to this stuff…
Scammers have learned there is no enforcement of the Do Not Call list. Individuals have been successful filing their own complaints and filing legal actions and getting fines (up to $1500 per call). Very time consuming. the FCC and FTC only get involved when 10’s of thousands of traceable calls to the same scam can be enforced.
Scammers use technology to annoy us. This includes:
Spoofing Caller ID to a random, fictitious or disconnected number.
Changing Caller ID name to misleading name.
Use of autodialed autodelivery technology, mostly forbidden by legitimate callers without prior permission. You could get up to 20 calls per minute with this annoyance.
Use of random or sequential number dialing. So what if you are on the do not call list, they don’t care.
Failure to identify the Calling entity
Failure to provide a valid callback number.
Failure to comply with a do-not call request.
Political campaigns also use these same tactics, so do not expect any laws to stop these abuses. They want to annoy us just as much as scammers. They really do not care if we do not want to be called, have our number unlisted, or want our privacy protected. Political campaigns believe freedom of speech (ie to annoy) = invasion of privacy as protected actions and they have the right to intrude into your home or any personal phone with their message repeatedly, without any way to call them back, ask them to stop or comply with any request to stop calling.
A new push to get the telcos to allow consumers to block an unlimited number of callers on landline and cell phones is in the works. The technology is their to allow more blocking. If your phone company allows 20 block numbers, they can allow unlimited blocked numbers.
http://consumersunion.org/end-robocalls/problems/
https://secure.consumersunion.org/site/Advocacy?id=2995
Even blocking the number doesn’t prevent “Tim” from leaving voicemails two or three times a week. He is continuously sending his regrets for missing me regarding my $250K small business line of credit. Others have included proposed remedies for my non-existent student loans, etc. I once gave a quixotic try to kill off a couple of fax scammers back in the day and found out then that the FCC is useless.