March had roughly the same call volume as last June with 4.4 billion calls, meaning robocall volumes have essentially returned to where they were in the Spring of 2021, prior to rolling out new Stir/Shaken rules for call authentication. However, call volumes still have declined materially from the nearly 5 billion that occurred roughly a year ago, in March 2021, and are far below the 5.7 billion robocalls/month peak from October 2019.

“It’s incredibly disappointing but not unexpected to see robocall volumes back where they were before the deployment of Stir/Shaken,” said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. “Robocalls continue to be a stubbornly hard problem, though the good news is that they are less of a problem than they were a few years ago.”

These latest figures are provided by YouMail, a totally free robocall blocking app and call protection service for mobile phones. These figures are determined by extrapolating from the robocall traffic attempting to get through to YouMail’s millions of active users.

Most Unwanted Robocall in March stop robocallers

March’s most unwanted robocall campaign is estimated to have been the source of tens of millions of robocalls from roughly 6,000 different numbers. The callers claim to be reaching people who qualify for “ObamaCare” health insurance policies. As in this example, callers appear to be violating a variety of telemarketing regulations, at a minimum, as they do not identify themselves, do not provide a call back number, and further appear to be calling people who did not give prior consent.

Hello, we have been trying to reach you because you qualify for assistance to help pay for your health insurance through the marketplace. The government issued an emergency order reopening the health insurance marketplace, and in most cases, your monthly premium will be from one dollar to $20 per month. Please press zero now to be transferred to a licensed agent. If we’ve reached you in error please press nine now to be removed.

In addition, last month’s loan approval scam robocall continues unabated at a roughly 100 million calls/month pace.

Unwanted Calls Jumped Dramatically in March 2022 stop robocallers

In March the number of unwanted spam and scam calls increased dramatically, increasing by over 700 million calls for the month to nearly 2.4 billion, which constituted over 55% of all robocalls. Specifically, scam calls increased by 59% to 1.65 billion and telemarketing calls increased by 17% to 0.73 billion. On the other hand, robocalls that are likely more wanted, like Notifications and Payment Reminders, were down by approximately 100 million robocalls to just under 2 billion in the month.

“Winners” in March 2022

In March, the same area codes and states that have had the most robocalls in recent months maintained their positions with one exception. Louisiana replaced South Carolina as the state with most robocalls/person.

These data points are provided by YouMail, a free call protection app for mobile phones. YouMail recently won the American Business Awards’ Gold Stevie Award for Technical Innovation of the Year, and the YouMail app was named the nation’s best robocall-blocking solution in a competition organized by Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post.

YouMail blocks unwanted robocallers by making sure the user’s phone doesn’t ring and then plays an out-of-service message that leads them to think they dialed an invalid number. YouMail identifies problematic numbers and robocalls using a combination of its recently patented audio fingerprinting technology, call patterns, and consumer feedback. stop robocallers