The FCC Is Working To Steadily Reduce Your Unwanted Phone Calls

Do you suffer from the daily dilemma of your phone being flooded with spam calls? According to WIVB-TV and data from YouMail some 19 cities from Akron, Ohio to Tulsa, saw robocalls increase last month.

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That may seem like a large number of cities, but the opposite is happening almost everywhere else in the country.

Robocalls dropped 5% nationwide last month – that's a decline of more than 200 million calls. Experts link the decline to something called STIR/SHAKEN, an acronym that has nothing to do with James Bond's favorite martini.

The Federal Communications Commission is requiring phone providers to implement caller ID technology that makes it harder for spammers to spoof numbers (like when they duplicate a call from your area code). The deadline to implement the technology was June 30, hence the big nationwide drop in July.

Where did Buffalo fall on the list of 100 cities? Right in the middle according to the YouMail report:

52. Buffalo NY 27,100,700 -5%

52.	Buffalo	NY	27,100,700	-5%

Still, summer is high time for spam calls, says Kent Welch, chief data officer at First Orion a company that creates scam protection technologies.

“Remember that scammers are running a business, even if it is illegal,” says Welch. People reported losing $3.3 billion to fraud in 2020 to the Federal Trade Commission – and those are just the folks who reported it. Scammers reach most of their victims by phone, the FTC says.

Scammers are constantly trying to get better at what they do.

Here are tips from the experts to protect yourself from scammers:

Don’t answer unknown numbers.
Don’t give out any personal information over the phone
If you get a call from someone claiming to be with your bank or credit union hang up, call your bank or credit union yourself to verify.
If a robotic voice asks you if you’d like to be placed on the “do not call list, Hang up.”
Finally, consider getting a call blocking service and registering with the federal Do Not Call registry.

You can see YouMail’s full robocall report here.