Robocalls On The Rise In Connecticut — But Help Is On The Way

CONNECTICUT — No, you aren't imagining it: Robocalls have increased sharply over the last couple of years, and Connecticut has been hit particularly hard.

Robocall blocking company YouMail estimates that between 60 and 75 billion robocalls will have been placed in 2019, up from 47 billion last year and 30 billion the year before. It should come as no surprise that scams increasingly account for the majority of robocalls—45 percent of them in 2019, compared to just 17.6 percent in 2016.

To investigate this issue further, cell phone industry consultants Let’s Talk culled robocall complaint and call frequency data from Federal Trade Commission and YouMail, and assigned each state in the U.S. a score. Based on this methodology, Maryland, Nevada, Colorado, Delaware and New Jersey have been hit the hardest by robocalls in 2019. The average Maryland resident receives a whopping 18 robocalls a month.

Alaskans have suffered the least from robocalls this year—residents receive an average of 3.3 of them a month—followed by North Dakota, Indiana, Hawaii, Mississippi.

Here In Connecticut:

• Residents were estimated to have been robocalled more than 643 million times in 2019
• Connecticut residents made more than 74,000 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about robocalls throughout the year
• The average Connecticut resident received 15.2 robocalls per month in 2019
• After controlling for population, Connecticut made some of the most complaints per resident to the FTC for robocalls out of any state in 2019 (20.9 per every 1000 people), helping to rank them as the 7th state "most bothered" by robocalls

More interesting findings:

• Eastern coastal states and Western states topped the "most bothered" by robocalls rankings this year, while states in the Midwest and Central US were "less bothered"
• At least 58 billion robocalls were estimated to have been placed in 2019, up 22.36 percent from last year
• Scams made up the largest portion (45.7 percent) of robocalls nationwide in 2019, followed by alerts and reminders (22.7 percent), payment reminders (20.3 percent), and telemarketing calls (11.3 percent)
• Scams are on the rise. Over the past three years, they’ve risen from making up just 17.6 percent of robocalls to making up more than 45 percent of them

Here’s a state-by- state breakdown of the robocall rankings:

Fortunately, there’s help on the way. A new federal law raises the penalty for a single robocall to a make-them-think-twice-about-it $10,000. The major carriers have already rolled out a new robocall fighting measure called STIR/SHAKEN, which promises to help to ease the problem as well.

To come up with the state robocall rankings, Let's Talk calculated each state's ranking by giving them a weighted score based on two data points: the monthly number of robocalls per person in each state (weighted at 40 percent) according to YouMail, and the number of monthly robocall complaints per person made to the Federal Trade Commission in each state (weighted at 60 percent). The states were then ordered and ranked according to this score.