Your cell phone will receive tons of additional spam calls next year – BGR

If you've already answered a call on your cell phone with an unknown number but a local area code, and you're wondering, maybe I should see who's there to find out that it's spam, we have bad news. It will happen a lot more next year.

A new report predicts that nearly half of US mobile traffic in 2019 will be due to scams. Arkansas-based First Orion is predicted to offer caller identification and call blocking technology and expects that calls will reach 45% of all cellphone calls next year. That is to say only 3.7% last year, which jumped to nearly 30% this year.

In an article on a company's blog, First Orion said it had "carefully analyzed more than 50 billion calls made to … customers over the last 18 months. By combining call patterns and specific behaviors with other phone number attributes, First Orion now predicts that nearly half of the calls to mobile phones will be fraudulent in 2019, unless

A big reason for the explosion of calls is the reason we mentioned at the very top. First, Orion explains the most popular method for getting people to pick up the phone, known as "Neighborhood Spoofing," which occurs when a rogue masks his own number and displays a local number on the identifier of the caller of the recipient. Not only does this trick mislead the person called, but the owner of that fake phone number used to make the call often receives calls back from the recipient of the fraudulent call.

And, of course, third-party call blocking apps do not really block these calls, because they actually contain only blacklists of scams, says Or First Orion's message. "Not legitimate numbers that are momentarily diverted by fraudsters."

"Year after year, the scam epidemic is bombarding consumers to record levels, surpassing the year before, and fraudsters are increasingly taking our privacy to new extremes," said Charles Morgan, CEO of First. Orion.

The problem is so prevalent that even the FCC president, Ajit Pai, receives these same fraudulent calls. He told NPR Planet Money In August of last year, "From time to time, even on my work, Blackberry, I would see a call that seems to arrive. . . from area code 202, which is here in Washington – and then our prefix for these blackberries. And I know very well that, you know, it's probably not a person who calls from the office. Sometimes I answer just for fun. And that's it, I've won a vacation … "

Speaking of the FCC, the agency claims to receive more than 200,000 complaints a year for unwanted calls. According to his 2016 estimate, Americans have received about 2.4 billion unwanted calls a month, probably a fair figure, it has been said, for two years.