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When your phone rings today, you probably should not answer it.
It's likely to be an automated call – and you'll probably get several over the next 24 hours. In fact, you may feel that you have received more than ever this year.
Automated calls, automated calls usually with a recorded message, have been harassing consumers for decades. But the call rate has accelerated this year, leaving regulators, operators and software companies looking for a fix.
"Every time my phone rings, the work I do is interrupted," said Hannah Donahue, media strategist in Los Angeles. "Even if I do not answer the phone, it's disturbing."
Donahue, 31, says she receives about six automated calls a day, starting at 7 am and continuing until the evening.
The calls are particularly intrusive because she has to keep her phone with her to answer calls from customers, she said. And because she has stopped answering calls from unknown numbers, she sometimes misses an important call.
Donahue said the frequency of calls has increased this year. The data backs up.
The number of automated calls placed in the country has increased by 50% between February and July, according to data from YouMail, a company providing voice mail and call blocking services to iPhone and iPad users. # 39; s Android.
Unwanted and self-dialing telemarketing calls were the main consumer complaint to the Federal Communications Commission last year, and they are still this year. This puts these complaints above billing disputes, the availability of services and the indecency of the program.
All automated calls are not bad. Some, like appointment reminders and flight updates, are generally welcome. However, automated scams, such as the wave of calls targeting Chinese communities this spring, can be detrimental. According to reports in the press, more than 30 consumers in New York City were allegedly stolen from about 3 million dollars by appellants claiming to belong to the Chinese consulate and asking for money to settle a criminal case.
According to YouMail, scams accounted for about 40% of the 4.4 billion automated calls placed in September in the United States.
All toll codes are not equal: 404 toll-free phone numbers (Atlanta) received an average of 68 automated calls in September. This is much higher than the worst area code, 202 in Washington, D.C., which received an average of 49 automated calls the same month.
"This has certainly been built in the past five years, but it has gotten worse this year," said Ethan Garr, vice president of TelTech Systems, which manufactures the RoboKiller call blocking application. . Like YouMail, RoboKiller has also seen a sharp increase in the number of automated calls this year.
Experts are divided on the cause of the sharp increase in the number of appeals this year. Garr said some of the calls may have been political solicitations before the mid-term primaries. But YouMail's president, Alex Quilici, told NBC News that he thought that changing consumer behavior had pushed the fraudsters to make more efforts.
"The carriers have begun to identify the perpetrators," Quilici said. "Call blocking apps have started to grow and get advertising. What we think is that the bad guys have started to have more calls to get through. "
Experts agree on what motivates automated calls: technology. Several people told NBC News that many websites and apps allow anyone to send automated calls, often at little cost.
"You can access some websites, enter your phone numbers, your audio, press a button and now you annoy a city," Quilici said.
"Voice calls are so cheap that they cost only a penny a minute and [robocallers] pay for calls that pick up, "said Garr." You are not limited by the number of calls you can make.You are limited by the number of people who can answer calls. "
In April, the Senate learned how easy it was to make a phone call when Adrian Abramovich, the "leader", appeared before the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
The FCC fined Abramovich $ 120 million in May for placing nearly 100 million automated calls over a three-month period. In his testimony to the Senate, Abramovich told the committee that he had found software and callback services by performing a search in Google.
Abramovich also stated that many services offered a "neighborhood spoofing" function, which gave the impression that the automated calls originated from the recipient's area code.
"Spoofing is very easy," Abramovich told the committee. "You can do it in a day."
Abramovich did not respond to messages requesting additional comments.
The FCC encourages consumers to let unknown calls connect to voicemail or hang up for calls that require them to press a button to no longer receive calls. The FCC also recommends registering with the national self-excluded subscriber registry, which prevents callers from being disturbed by lawful telemarketers. But do not expect everything to be settled.
While the list of excluded phone numbers interrupts legitimate business calls, experts said that illegal callers had no problem ignoring the list.
"The vast majority of calls you receive are fraudulent calls or spam calls or businesses that are not afraid to take the risk," Garr said.
Mobile operators and phone manufacturers have also stepped up their efforts to combat automated calls.
The four largest carriers in the country, AT & T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, all offer blocked call blocking services. Last week, Google unveiled a call screening feature in its latest Pixel smartphone, which will answer and transcribe automated calls. And the telecommunications industry is working on a technological standard, called Stir / Shaken, designed to authenticate phone numbers and make it more difficult to usurp content.
These types of technological improvements could eventually help solve the problem, said Quilici, drawing parallels with the fight against spam in the 2000s.
"It's actually true for email," Quilici said. "We still get a ton of spam, but Google and everyone else have such an email filtering ability that you will not notice it – the phone network has not been as sophisticated as filtering."
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