On Monday’s Gill Report– broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 1510 WLAC weekdays at 7:00 am – Star News Digital Media National Political Editor Steve Gill discussed the mass amounts of unwanted calls from sales and insurance companies and how it is preventing people from answering and opening calls and texts much like the times of the email spam days.
He went on to close the commentary by calling for a solution to this growing problem.
Gill continued:
How often do you refuse to answer calls that either designate on your mobile phone that they may be spam, or it’s a blocked number, or you don’t identify the number? More and more people will not answer a call on their cell phone unless they knew who it is. So, you gotta leave a message and hope they call you back. And generally, if you get a call from a number you don’t recognize or from a blocked number and they don’t leave a message that’s a pretty good sign that it was one of those sales calls or spam calls.
So, more and more people are not answering unless they have your number in their phone. And now a new report says nearly half of all cell phone calls will be scams by 2019. 2019, just next year nearly half of all calls will be fraudulent unless we take some action right now. Now the report from the group called First Orion, which provides call management and protection services for major carriers like T-Mobile and others says that they’ve seen a huge spike in fraudulent calls in the past year.
Zooming from three-point seven percent of total calls in 2017. Twenty nine percent in 2018 and it’s expected to jump to forty-five percent by early 2019. Over fifty billion calls made to cell phone customers over the past eighteen months were analyzed to prepare the report.
I gotta tell ya, with the number that I get, we may be understating the number of spam calls, sales calls, even if you go on the do not call registry you still keep getting these ‘we want to sell you insurance, we want to sell you this’. And part of the scam is that if you do business with a company even in the do not call registry they are free to keep calling you.
Political calls can still come in even if you are on the do not call registry. So, while you can help limit the number of these calls you get you can’t completely eliminate them. I don’t know what the answer is. I just know that the unwanted texts that I’m starting to get from numbers that I haven’t subscribed to and there’s nothing on there that says unsubscribe is starting to make me less likely to even open texts.
Email opening has dropped off like crazy over the years as people where sending those spam emails. So, if you’re trying to do sales, if you’re trying to reach customers, prospective customers it’s going to get harder and harder because of those who are abusing the system unless we start to fix the system.
Anyway, go to TennesseeStar.com I’ll link that story up and we’ll see if we can’t find a solution that doesn’t clog up our phones with more bogus calls.
Listen to the full segment:
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