A new interactive web page from the Federal Trade Commission aims to shed a little light on what’s become a huge problem in the United States: unwanted robocalls.
New FTC robocall tool shows who gets the most spam calls
The page, which the FTC says will be updated quarterly, let’s users see spam call statistics at the state and even county level. It also includes information on calls by type, by date and whether those calls were made by a machine or a live person. The statistics are based on complaints made from October 2016 to June 2019 to the National Do Not Call Registry about unwanted calls.
The Do Not Call Registry accepts numbers from both cell phones and landlines.
The page is interactive, so it’s worth spending some time poking around on it to see what you can discover. Here are some of the most interesting things Team Clark found:
- New Jersey had the most complaints per capita, with 7,609 complaints registered per 100,000 residents
- At the other end of the spectrum was Alaska with just 1,380 complaints per 100,000 residents
- States with the most complaints were concentrated in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and West
- Calls about reducing debt received the most complaints — nearly twice as many as the next category, medical and prescription calls
- Even though it may appear that the robocall problem is getting worse and worse, it appears that they may have peaked in the middle of 2017. Complaints were at their lowest point over the last few years in January of 2019
That may be in part because phone carriers appear to finally be getting serious about reducing the number of spam calls their customers are getting. The U.S. government has announced that it is working on measures to do the same.
If you want to prevent robocalls in your life, check out Team Clark’s guide to stop robocalls for good!
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