Robocalls On The Rise Again After A Brief Coronavirus-Fueled Dip

If you’ve been inundated with calls about your car’s extended warranty, you’re not alone. There has been an uptick in robocalls across the country, with Arizona seeing roughly 291.1 million unwanted calls being made so far this year.

Prior to the pandemic, the number of robocalls being made was roughly 5 billion a month. At the start of the pandemic, those numbers fell to as low as 2.8 billion calls a month — a nearly 50 percent drop. Now, robocalls are beginning to rise back up again.

In 2020, around 985.7 million robocalls were made in Arizona , while 2019 saw 1.1 billion calls made.

Robocalls dropped during the height of the pandemic because call centers that made them had to shut down or reduce the number of people working as a precaution against the virus, according to Alex Quilici, CEO of the call protection company YouMail.

“What that meant was there wouldn’t be any point to do a robocall if no one at a call center would be around to respond to people who pressed 1 for more info on a message or called the number back,” he said.

However, with more Americans each day getting vaccinated against COVID-19 and returning to work, call centers are opening back up again.

Here are the top 10 states that have received the most robocalls as of April:

1. Texas: 1.51 billion calls
2. California: 1.18 billion calls
3. Florida: 1.14 billion calls.
4. Georgia: 865 million calls
5. New York: 725 million calls
6. North Carolina: 545 million calls
7. Ohio: 531 million calls
8. Illinois: 510 million calls
9. Tennessee: 475 million calls
10. Pennsylvania: 460 million calls

The calls about a car’s extended warranty have been the most prominent of the robocalls that have plagued Americans this year, Quilici said. Around 300,000 million of those occur each month.

Although there are federal laws against unsolicited robocalls, some unscrupulous call centers have outright ignored them, according to Quilici. Centers will “spoof” their numbers to disguise their identity on a person’s caller ID or try to misrepresent who they are on the phone.

However, some robocalls are from legitimate companies that have been given permission to call by the person they’re contacting — sometimes that person is unaware they gave their consent in the first place.

“If you applied for a mortgage or some kind of loan, there’s usually a little checkbox that says, ‘I give my consent to the bank (or whoever) to call or text me using an automated dialing system,'” Quilici said. “Basically, it’s a bunch of legal language that gives them permission to call you with robocalls.”

There are some strategies people can take to avoid being faced with a barrage of unwanted calls.
A simple one is for people to not answer calls from any numbers they don’t recognize or to call them back. When someone answers their phone, the call center will recognize it as an active number connected to someone and will continue to call it.

If a person does want to call back a number, Quilici suggests they do their homework first.

“If it says they’re a bank, go to that bank’s website, find the number there and call them directly,” he said. “Don’t just call the number back because they say they’re the bank — that’s how you get scammed.”

Another good tactic is to download a call protection app specifically designed to block unwanted calls. Apps such as YouMail are able to analyze a call and put it through if it’s from a legitimate number.

If it’s from a known scammer or robocaller, the number goes straight to the phone’s spam box.
“They’re not 100 percent perfect, but a call protection app will dramatically reduce the number of unwanted calls that get through,” Quilici said.