The FTC just came down hard on those annoying robocall operations

Robocalls have become an unfortunately common part of daily life in America. Everyone knows how it works: A phone number, often somewhat similar to your own, calls you and offers some kind of health insurance or student loan scam.

It’s almost not even worth answering the phone for numbers you don’t recognize anymore.

With any luck, robocalls might slow down just a little bit in the near future. The Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday it had settled charges with four different scam phone call operations in the U.S. The FTC collectively credited these robocallers with “billions” of fraudulent phone calls.

The four organizations that settled with the FTC were NetDotSolutions, Higher Goals Marketing, Veterans of America and PointBreakMedia. They were each banned from doing more telemarketing scams with automatic phone dialing and will pay heavy fines for their actions. 

Each of the four defendants named by the FTC engaged in slightly different scams, but they should all be familiar to anyone with a phone in the U.S. They used dialing technology to blast out billions of phone calls to try and sell people on debt relief schemes, among other things.

Veterans for America, for example, tried to swindle people into donating things like cars and boats in the name of helping nonexistent charities for veterans. In reality, it was run by a man named Travis Deloy Peterson who just sold the things people gave him.

Pointbreak Media, on the other hand, would pretend to be a representative from Google and either promise businesses higher placement in Google searches or threaten to de-list them, unless they paid hundreds of dollars in fraudulent fees. 

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that robocalls are on the rise in recent years, but actual numerical estimates are pretty staggering. A study by YouMail, a company that makes robocall blocking software, found that almost 48 billion fake phone calls were made in the U.S. in 2018. That was up from more than 30 billion the previous year.

With such a huge number of robocalls being made every year (and such a large yearly increase), it’s worth wondering just how much of a dent the FTC put into the scam this week. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission slapped fines on one man who was responsible for 96 million robocalls alone, so it might be a while before the problem is fixed for good.