The US Scam Call Epidemic

44.6% of calls to US phones will be scams in 2019

While the scam call epidemic continues to grow, consumers are actively searching for ways to protect themselves against annoying and often fraudulent calls.

First Orion, a leading provider of US phone call and data transparency solutions, found these kinds of calls are on an alarming rise.

First Orion powers call protection solutions to tens of millions of mobile subscribers in the U.S. market and has carefully analyzed over 50 billion calls made to these customers over the past 18 months. By combining specific call patterns and behaviors with other phone number attributes, First Orion now predicts that nearly half of all calls to mobile phones
will be fraudulent in 2019.

Scammers Ramp Up

As new technologies and tactics cause mobile scams to skyrocket in frequency, consumers may feel like every other call they receive is unwanted. In fact, this isn't far from the truth.

First Orion's analysis projects that 42.1% of all calls will be scam or nuisance by Q2 2019, up from 30.9% in 2018 and 14.4% in 2017. That's nearly half of all calls. Unless widespread action is taken to solve this problem, the rate of scam calls will only continue to grow.

Neighborhood Spoofing

There are a number of techniques scammers use to get people to pick up the phone, but the most popular method is known as “Neighborhood Spoofing,” which happens when a scammer disguises their phone number and displays it as a local US number on a user’s caller ID.

For example, a scammer may spoof their phone number to match the US area code and 3-digit prefix of the person they are targeting and ultimately increase the likelihood of someone answering.

Not only is this tactic harmful towards the person being called, the owner of the phone number used to make the call is often subjected to return calls from the recipient of the scam call. These return calls come as surprises since the owner of the number used to make the scam call is not aware a call was ever placed from their number, leading to frustration and confusion amongst all parties.

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