Five Surprising Facts About Spam Calls

If you’ve ever been annoyed by the number of robocalls you get, this is for you. It’s five surprising facts about spam calls . . .

1. Spam calls aren’t getting worse. A new study out of North Carolina State University found that the number of robocalls we get are basically the same from month to month. Even though it FEELS like the problem is getting worse.

2. Answering spam calls or talking with telemarketers won’t make you get more of them. The authors of the study found that answering robocalls or talking with telemarketers doesn’t have an effect on the number of calls you receive.

3. The majority of robocalls don’t contain a recorded message. About 62% of the unsolicited calls in the study included no audio at all.

4. Some people get so many unsolicited calls it makes their phone unusable. The researchers found that there have been instances of people receiving hundreds of back-to-back calls, which can make their phone unusable for multiple DAYS. They say it happens when a spam caller uses a fake phone number, and that phone number actually belongs to someone. Then the robocaller makes thousands of calls using that number, and tons of people see it on their missed call list and call it back.

5. It might be impacting the pandemic. The researchers say that healthcare workers and contact tracers have been calling from phone numbers people don’t recognize. And since we’re all wary about answering unknown calls these days, it’s made it more difficult for healthcare workers to do their job.

Just in case you want to dive into this a bit deeper, check out this and this.


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