Companies in the credit and collection industry that are actively monitoring to make sure their outgoing calls are not being labeled as spam or fraud should be making sure to check out the smaller carriers, according to a report released yesterday which revealed that telecom carriers outside of the six largest companies account for 88% of all robocall activity.
The six largest carriers, which represent 70% of all cell phone calls during the first half of 2019 accounted for just 12% of robocalls, according to the report, which was released by TNS. The report also noted that robocallers are shifting away from spoofing Voice-over IP phone numbers and are now focusing more on using toll-free numbers to try and scam individuals into picking up the phone. The percentage of toll-free robocalls doubled in the past year and 80% of all calls that are perceived as nuisance or high-risk calls are coming from toll-free numbers.
Nearly 30% of all calls are nuisance, scam, or fraudulent, a percentage that works out to about 200 million calls per day, according to the report.
“However, with top carriers successfully blocking more robocalls, the report suggests the need for diligence as the battlefront may shift to smaller regional and rural carriers further behind on their path to a call authentication framework and utilizing call data analytics,” said Bill Versen, Chief Product Officer at TNS, in a statement.
