What Do Not Call complaints are telling us

Have you gotten a call from an imposter, maybe someone pretending to be with the Social Security Administration, IRS, or a tech support company, this year? If so, you’re not alone. Calls from imposters were the most-reported topic of unwanted calls to the FTC over the past year (FY2019).

You can see our annual report on Do Not Call complaints, with state-specific data. But here are some key takeaways:

• The FTC got 5.4 million complaints about unwanted calls this year.

71% of complaints reported the call was a robocall.

Calls from imposters are now the most-reported type of unwanted call, with 574,000 complaints.

After imposters, the next most-reported topics were calls about medical issues and prescriptions, as well as reducing debt.

The states with the most consumer complaints (per 100,000 population) were Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, New Jersey, and Nevada.

The Do Not Call Registry now has 239.5 million numbers on it. More than 4 million of those were added over the past year.

Find out more about what’s happening in your state. But remember — you don’t need to wait for our annual report to know what’s happening. As we told you this summer, the FTC’s Do Not Call data is now available in an interactive format at ftc.gov/exploredata, and is updated quarterly.

The FTC continues to go after the companies and scammersbehind these calls, so please keep reporting unwanted calls at donotcall.gov (or, if you’ve lost money to a scam call, at ftc.gov/complaint instead). We take the phone numbers you report and release them to the public each business day, which helps phone carriers and other partners that are working on call-blocking and call-labeling solutions. Your reports also help law enforcement identify the people behind illegal calls.

To find out more about how to get fewer calls and avoid scams, check out the articles, videos, and infographics at ftc.gov/calls, and share them with your family and friends.

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