Due to recently we receive a lot of Spam calls , Sales calls. Our management decided to stop answering calls from unknown numbers. If you are new customer ,any enquiries may drop us e-mail Hello@akgroup.com.my or WhatsApp to our support line +6011-3300 1318.
What are spam calls, and where do they come from?
What is spam calls, they tend to refer to four types of calls:
- Telemarketing: These calls originate from a live person who is trying to sell you something from a legally registered business. Such calls are annoying but generally not fraudulent.
- Legal robocalls: Legal robocalls are automated calls for notifications, services, or sometimes bills. A robocall is not inherently spam. Everyone gets legitimate robocalls from doctor’s offices confirming appointments, political campaigns looking for votes, debt collectors pursuing money, charities contacting prior donors, or schools making announcements.
- Illegal robocalls: Illegal robocalls include many prerecorded messages you didn’t sign up to receive. This category includes calls such as a sketchy auto-warranty call, student-loan scams, or a call that went out during the presidential election telling people not to vote (subscription required to read article). In some cases, such as the auto-warranty call, you’re asked to press a button to connect to a live person, who then attempts to scam you.
- Scam calls: When a live person calls and tries to defraud you in some way, that’s a scam call. This category includes everything from the aforementioned car-warranty scam to kidnapping scams. There are so many robocall scam variations that the Federal Communications Commission keeps a glossary of different iterations.
Such calls have been around for decades, but they’ve increased over the years due to the simplicity of the technology behind them. Through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calling, a single computer can make thousands of calls an hour. Caller ID spoofing—in which a caller shows up on your phone’s display with a legitimate number or, in some cases, with your number—has also become easier, which makes it possible for callers to get around lists that block specific numbers. FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement in May 2022 that in the previous year, as many as two-thirds of robocalls were originating from outside the US.
According to complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission between December 2019 and December 2020, people filed over 4 million Do Not Call complaints, with around 71% being robocalls and 22% being a live caller. Imposters (a sort of catch-all term that includes IRS scams, nanny scams, and Social Security scams) comprised the number-one complaint category for the FTC in that time period, followed by warranty scams, debt scams, medical scams, and tech-support scams. Over at the FCC, which keeps a different log of consumer complaints, the auto-warranty renewal scam was the most common complaint of 2020.
Of course, these figures account only for the complaints that people bothered to file with the FTC or FCC. The anti-robocall company YouMail estimates that 3.9 billion robocalls were placed in April 2022—only a slight decline from the 4.6 billion it estimated in February 2021 when we first published this article. By YouMail’s estimate, that’s about 12 calls per month per person.
Many of these scams follow a logical pattern. For example, you’re likely to get more IRS scams during tax-filing season, and scams pitching fake coronavirus tests became common in 2020. Aid scams follow disasters around the US, as happened during the wildfires in California in 2020, where residents got calls from scammers posing as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
