Spam calls have become obnoxious as of late for many people - myself included - and it looks like they are only going to get worse. First Orion Corporation, which provides spam call filters to carriers, estimates that 44.56% of all calls in 2019 will be spam.

The company reports that 29.2% of calls are spam in 2018, an exponential rise from 3.7% in 2017. 'Neighborhood spoofing,' where the scammer's phone number appears to have the same area code as the recipient, is especially common. Spam blockers are useless against these types of calls, since the scammer can just change the number to something else and try again.

None of this is really surprising, but it's interesting to see hard numbers about the growing trend. The company hopes that machine learning can eventually be used to detect and block these calls at the network level, but the problem still won't go away anytime soon.

Via: CNET

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