Robocalls? They’re so 2010s.
As bothersome automated telemarketing calls decrease across New York, robotexts are the new enemy no. 1 in the phone scam category. But they’re so difficult to track that it’s tough to know how many are pinging New Yorkers’ mobile phones, and who’s sending them.
Robocalls have sharply decreased in NY. Why?
Between 2021 and 2022, there was a 46% decrease in consumer complaints concerning violations of the Do Not Call (DNC) Law in New York, according to the New York State Department of Consumer Protection’s 2022 Annual Report.
And so far in 2023, the DCP has received 63,987 complaints, state officials said, compared to 131,851 in 2022 and 247,014 in 2021.
National numbers are down too. According to the National Do Not Call Registry, about 56,000 less robocalls were made in June 2023 than in June 2022.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats, pushed for federal Do Not Call legislation in 2021 that would allow for prison time for knowingly violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and raise fines for falsifying caller identification from $10,000 to $20,000. A similar bill was introduced in the U.S. House this year.
But phone scams aren’t going away — they’re just changing, associate professor at Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology Rajendran Murthy said.
“Definitely the trend seems to be an increase in the texts,” New York University associate professor of computer science and engineering Damon McCoy said. “Most phones these days have a feature to suppress unknown numbers when they call you … Texts are a little bit more persistent.”
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Why are robotexts so hard to manage in NY, across U.S.?
The bottom line is, they’re hard to track and regulate.
Consumers are more careful about picking up phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, Murthy said, but that doesn’t really work the same…
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