It’s been almost 3 years since the TRACED Act was signed into law.
It’s been well over a year since Stir/Shaken rolled out with great fanfare.
It’s in the news now about more and more lawsuits by State Attorneys General, going after the robocallers and the carriers that support them.
Yet according to the YouMail Robocall Index there were more robocalls in August, 2022 than any time since March, 2021. And we’re in spitting distance of hitting 5 billion robocalls in a month again, which hasn’t happened since before the pandemic. (Yes, we’re lower than the all-time highs from October, 2019, which is great. However, progress is slower than anyone expected, and there’s considerable risk of backsliding once again.)
So it’s reasonable to wonder why robocalls are still a thing.
Oddly, it’s because the song mostly remains the same.
The economics of being an illegal robocaller is still really compelling. It’s still remarkably easy to make millions of robocalls in the hopes of finding victims. It’s still not necessary to find many victims to make boatloads of money.
Yes, Stir/Shaken made it harder to just make up numbers. In fact, that was the whole point of authenticated caller id. But the robocallers seem to be just switching to using real numbers, lots of them, from lots of different providers.
Yes, enforcement actions are hitting some carriers where it hurts for letting illegal traffic come on the network And enforcement actions are pushing some of the larger robocalling organizations to take a breather. (Though some seem to be have nine lives, coming back after signing agreements to stop making robocalls.) And we see some carriers going out of business, but the traffic seems to just move to other carriers.
But overall the calls just keep coming and coming and coming.
So what to do about it? As a consumer, it’s time to stop waiting and take a few minutes to put a quality robocall blocking app on your phone. If you use our free YouMail app, not only are you protected from many of those calls, but you’ll be helping solve the problem. YouMail actually collects data on the illegal calls that come in to its users, and uses that data to work with law enforcement to help track down and shut down more of the bad guys. And if you just want the problem to go away, try YouMail Plus, which is guaranteed to stop 100% of all robocalls (or your money back).
The bottom line is this. If enough people protect themselves with YouMail, it makes the economics of robocalling much less compelling, and it allows far more and faster actions against the robocallers. And together we might finally make it so robocalls aren’t a thing any more.
