The summer of robocalls - A review of over 1 million consumer complaints to the FTC.
Residents of Alaska, Indiana and North Dakota are least likely to receive robocalls while occupants of Colorado, Arizona and Oregon are in the top. Over 70% of all complaints are now robocallers, up from last year's 50% share.

Every weekday, the Federal Trade Commission publishes a list of consumer complaints. The list includes the recorded phone number, city, state and type of call.

We've analysed three months of data - from June to August. There were 1,342,117 complaints for 745,217 unique phone numbers at an average of 430,000 claims per month and four calls per 1,000 people.
Some states registered almost double the rate. It seems that state size doesn't influence the frequency of unsolicited calls. District of Columbia and Arizona (ten times more populated) have the same amount of complaints per capita.








Out of all complaints, 71% are pre-recorded messages compared to last year data which shows a massive increase from the 50%.












Data from the summer of 2019 shows an increase in a type of scam called "One ring". One in five calls had no message. Usually, when consumers ring back, they incur huge charges on their bills.
Impersonating government, established businesses or even family and friends are responsible for 1 in 3 calls.

Toll-free numbers account for 23% of all complaints. They create a false sense of trust and consumers tend to be more likely to ring back.

Fighting phone scams seems to only be growing and summertime did not provide a decrease in annoyances.


About Reported.tel
Reported.tel’s mission is to offer everyone free and instant access to tools to allow screening of robo callers. It achieves this by combining data from FTC and FCC with hourly updates from thousands of users.
Using Reported.tel is free of charge and for both personal and commercial use.