Almost half of US cellphone calls will be scams by next year, says report

Many of us are already conditioned to ignore phone calls from unknown numbers. A new study seems to validate that M.O. By next year, nearly half of the mobile phone calls we get will be scams, according to a new report from First Orion, a company that provides calls management and protection forT-Mobile,MetroPCs,Virgin Mobileand others.

The percentage of scam calls in US mobile traffic increased from 3.7 percent last year to 29.2 percent this year, and it’s predicted to rise to 44.6 percent in 2019, First Orion said in a press release Wednesday. The most popular method scammers use to try to get people to pick up the phone is called ‘neighborhood spoofing,’ where they disguise their numbers with a local prefix so people presume the calls are safe to pick up, First Onion said. Third-party call blocking apps may help protect consumers from known scam numbers, but they can’t tell if a scammer hijacks someone’s number and uses it for scam calls.

First Orion in April testified before the US House Committee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection about combating robocalls, scam calls and caller ID spoofing with technologies. The company works with carrier giants like T-Mobile to alert consumers of scam calls by displaying ‘Scam Likely’ as caller ID on their phones.

Source: cnet.com