You’ve probably heard the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. In short, a mischievous shepherd boy plays a trick on local villagers, claiming his flock is being attacked by a wolf and calling for help. After raising multiple false alarms, the villagers don’t respond to his cries for help when a wolf really does attack his sheep. It’s a classic Aesop Fable as old as time that teaches us about honesty and the finite amount of patience people have for deception. You might also be familiar with the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” In other words, people really don’t like to be deceived.
This natural human tendency has a bearing on the fraught world of personal communications, and if deceptive robocalls go unchecked, everyone loses.
In this article, we cover:
- The negative impact of constant deception.
- A statistical breakdown of incoming calls, non-contact callers, and fraud.
- How to end robocalls and trust your ringing phone again.
According to YouMail data as of August 2020, 61 percent of all incoming calls in the United States are from a contact record stored on the recipient’s phone. These are the calls and callers we are usually happy to receive and answer. The remaining 39 percent of incoming calls, from numbers not stored in on our phones, however, are the ones that we’re are most suspicious of. Is it a wrong number? A loved one calling from a strange device during an emergency? Maybe it’s opportunity calling in the form of that dream job you applied to recently.
Whatever the case, these non-contact calls make up the predominant majority of our unanswered calls. Further, we are able to correlate more than half of these unanswered consumer calls from non-contacts to a legal relationship between call recipient and the calling party. However, 10 percent to 15 percent can be positively identified as fraud or a likely Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) violation by the caller. That means about four to six of every 100 phone calls you receive are fraudulent attempts on your personal security. Consider, too, that in August 2020 alone, 3.7 billion robocalls were placed in the United States, an average of 11.2 robocalls per person.
The constant, unrelenting scourge of illegal robocalls is so real and present for every American, it has a real effect on our ability to trust anyone on the other end of a call. This persistent campaign of deception put on by those who would deceive us out of our money, personal information, and sanity is exhausting, and it hurts those who call for legitimate purposes too. It’s so bad, many of us have developed a reflexive disdain for any call in which a real human isn’t on the other, even those meant to benefit us, like automated appointment reminders, payment reminders, and bank alerts.
And those placing the rest of those non-contact calls — the job recruiters getting back to you about your application, the unemployment office finally returning your messages, your long-lost uncle’s lawyer calling about a real inheritance — they get put off and opportunities may be lost forever.
Never Again!
With YouMail, you can stop robocalls dead in their tracks. We’ve answered well over 10 billion calls from more than 350 million phone numbers. This gives us a huge database of known bad numbers. When you use our free service, we can identify the scammers in real time, so you know which calls to answer and which you’re likely to want to answer. We will even play a “number not in service” message to known bad callers, striking your number from their lists. In all, we have stopped more than a billion robocalls.
Not bad for a free app. Not bad at all.
The benefits don’t stop there. We provide a multitude of free features for consumers and even more powerful services for small business and entrepreneurs at a highly competitive rate. Because, as much as fraudulent robocalls are an annoyance and risk to our personal finance, the potential losses for businesses are much greater. Do not sleep on the importance of a secure business line, no matter how small your operation.
So the next time your phone rings and you’re instinctively weary it’ll be a scummy robocall, remember that you have options. Don’t let the fraudsters cry “Wolf!” again, ruining big opportunities for you and your legitimate callers. Get a free YouMail account today, take action to stop the junk, and trust your phone when it rings once again.
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