Consumer reports about unwanted telemarketing calls are down by more than half since 2021, according to a report by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
This is the third year the FTC has recorded a drop in spam calls. Overall, there were roughly 33,000 fewer unwanted call complaints during the 2024 fiscal year compared to 2023.
The FTC attributes the recent decrease to the “multifaced strategy” it has used to crack down on unwanted calls. This includes introducing a rule banning the impersonation of government or business in April 2024, which gave the FTC the power to directly file federal court complaints to force scammers to return the stolen money. The agency estimates that these types of impersonation-based spam calls cost consumers $1.1 billion during the past year.
The FTC also highlighted a February 2024 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) making calls made with AI-generated voices are “artificial”, and therefore illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
“Illegal calls remain a scourge, but the FTC’s strategy to pursue upstream players and equip the agency to confront emerging threats is showing clear signs of success,” said Sam Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
But despite the FTC’s campaigns, some varieties of spam calls are still on the rise. The agency says that reports concerning calls about debt reduction, the third largest topic overall, jumped “more than 85 percent from last year.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just spam calls that consumers need to worry about. Spam is ever-present wherever consumers spend their time, and tech firms from across the spectrum have been forced to react.
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Instagram has had to roll out new tools that allow users to identify and categorize which of their followers could be spam accounts, as well as to ban entire groups of followers at once. Meanwhile, X rolled out new features in August that could help users filter out spammy replies from paying “Blue Check” users, who can pay extra to have their comments given higher visibility.
Last November, Gmail rolled out an entirely new text detection model, named “RETVec”, to do a better stop of sorting and blocking spam emails and reducing the number of emails wrongly labeled spam.
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