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Scam baiting FAQ
How many people get scam?
Answer by NeeP
I'm actually writing my bachelor thesis on this subject so I can help you out a bit. Numbers depend on each country, each country's police has stats that they publish but here are some interesting links to get started: - on page 8 they're mentioning some numbers of how much damage has been done - page 6 has some stats on robocalls, how many etc - Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit Global Tech Support Scam Research 2018
[06:22]
That's what I wrote so far on this topic:
Half of all calls to mobile phones throughout the US will be robocalls, similar to the one above, a drastic increase from the previous years according to an estimation by First Orion, a telecommunication solution provider which filters and blocks unwanted spam/robocalls from consumer devices (First Orion, 2018, p. 1). They analyzed 50 billion calls that were routed through their systems (First Orion, 2018, p. 1). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which supervises telecommunication related issues in the United States reports that around 232,000 complaints have been received in 2018 about unwanted phone calls, an increase to the figures of 2015 of 172,000 (Federal Communications Commission, 2019, p. 4). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reports 3.6 million complaints in 2015 and 5.8 million in 2018, a huge increase in only 3 years (Federal Communications Commission, 2019, p. 5). The FTC also states that their National Do Not Call Registry, which companies have to check whether a person or a phone number wants to receive telemarketing calls, has grown to 239.5 million actively registered phone numbers in 2019 (FTC, 2019, p. 1). With a population of 328.2 million in 2019, that would mean around 73% of the population do not wish to receive telemarketing calls and felt urged to put their number on that list, given we assume one telephone number per person (US Census Bureau, 2019, p. 1). YouMail, a technology provider for call filtering and blocking, estimates that the national volume on robocalls increased to around 48 billion calls in 2018 and as example, they show that in November 2018 there were about 2,000 calls per second (Federal Communications Commission, 2019, p. 6).
Tech support scams are part of fraudulent calls. A study by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit has shown that three out of five consumers have been exposed to tech support scams in 2018 (Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, 2018). These days, scammers use the COVID-19 pandemic to exploit the anxiety of the people and are blasting themed robocalls across the nation (FTC, 2020, p. 1).
In the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Office of Communications (Ofcom) reports 124,363 complaints in 2018 and, their studies have shown that still 49% of all adults in the UK who own a landline, a mobile phone or both have been targeted by nuisance calls (which include live and recorded marketing calls, silent calls, and abandoned calls) in 2019 (Ofcom, 2019, p. 3). While the number of complaints to ICO and Ofcom seem to be rather constant or even stagnating for the third year in a row, it still shows it’s a massive problem, and we’re only at the beginning to tackle it, reversing a decade long trend of increasing complaints (Ofcom, 2019, p. 2).
It's hard to say how many scammers are there because obviously there are no official statistics for that. You could have luck finding stats on how many scammers have been arrested but even that is complicated as usually the criminal statistics summarize different types of (call center) scams into one number.
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