Robocalls are big business, with scammers trying to scare people into giving out their personal and financial information.
Ken Welch is chief data officer at a call blocking company called First Orion.
“It's kind of like the game whack-a-mole if you will,” says Welch. “You bop them down over on one side and then they pop up somewhere else.”
Welch says they are always trying to keep one step ahead, tracking the activity of scammers.
“Our primary solution that has the most users on it is in the T-Mobile network. We actually eliminate a ton of traffic for those guys,” Welch says.
Americans lost $29.8 billion to phone scams alone between 2020 and 2021 with nearly one in three Americans saying they were the victim of a phone scam in the past year. Most of those calls are someone pretending to be from the IRS or from a company inquiring about an expiring warranty on your vehicle.
Those numbers have gone up considerably in the past five years.
Minnesota's Attorney General Keith Ellison says they are working with the phone companies as well to find better ways to block those calls. It is a multibillion dollar business however, and Ellison says it won't be easy to stop.
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