On Friday, the U.S. Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) reported that the variety of shopper complaints about undesirable telemarketing telephone calls has dropped over 50% since 2021, persevering with a pattern that began three years in the past.
This yr, the FTC has acquired 1.1 million stories concerning robocalls, down from 1.2 million one yr earlier than 2023 and from greater than 3.4 million in 2021.
In line with this yr’s Nationwide Do Not Name Registry Knowledge Ebook—which gives the latest knowledge on robocall complaints along with a whole state-by-state evaluation—the best variety of shopper complaints focused undesirable calls about medical and prescription points, with greater than 170,000 stories (most of them robocalls) acquired till September 30, 2024.
“Reports about imposters comprised the second-most commonly reported topic, with consumers filing more than 158,000 complaints,” the FTC added.
“Complaints about debt reduction made up the third-most commonly reported topic, followed by complaints about energy, solar, and utilities and home improvement and cleaning.”
Because the FTC mentioned at this time, that is the results of an ongoing crackdown on undesirable telemarketing calls. At its root is the FTC’s Nationwide Do Not Name (DNC) Registry, applied in 2003 and designed to cease undesirable gross sales calls from precise firms that comply with the regulation.
Since then, the registry has grown to 254 million energetic registrations in September 2024. Customers can add their telephone numbers on-line at donotcall.gov or by calling a toll‐free quantity (888‐382‐1222) from the phone numbers they want to register.
Undesirable telemarketing calls may also be reported by filling complaints on the similar internet tackle and calling the 1-888-382-1222 quantity. Sellers and telemarketers should take away numbers added to the DNC registry from their name lists a minimum of each 31 days.
Final yr, the company additionally introduced Operation Cease Rip-off Calls, a nationwide crackdown on unlawful telemarketing focusing on goal people and entities behind billions of unlawful calls and concerned in promoting over 700 million telemarketing leads.
The FTC additionally issued a rule banning the impersonation of presidency or companies in 2024 and expanded the Telemarketing Gross sales Rule (TSR) to guard companies towards unlawful telemarketing campaigns.
Different ongoing efforts embrace clarifying that the TSR covers AI-enabled rip-off calls and a Voice Cloning Problem to seek out new strategies to make it harder to make use of synthetic intelligence-driven instruments like voice clones and audio deepfakes for fraud.
