If you haven't been warned recently that your car warranty has expired, that something has gone badly wrong with your Social Security account or that you are in big trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, then you must not have a phone.
Those are just a few of the most popular messages delivered by robocallers, who often hide behind spoofed numbers to fool you into answering. RoboKiller, a company that makes technology to identify bogus calls, estimated that Americans were deluged with more than 72 billion spam calls in 2021 — a 32% increase over 2020. Spammers rang Californians' phones more than 7 billion times, RoboKiller estimated.
On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission took another step to identify and potentially block spam calls, closing one of the big loopholes in its enforcement efforts. The commission voted unanimously to extend its crackdown on caller ID spoofing — that is, callers who disguise the phone number they're using — to the gateways handling calls coming into the U.S. from other countries.
