I am located in Canada and I received about 15 - 20 spam phone calls each week. Most of them would even spoof the phone number to my area code (sometimes my own phone number lol). So I don't think it's a US only problem.
Report from Canada: I might receive something like three spam calls in the past year.
I don't know why my spam dropped so significantly when I moved up to Canada but it was quite dramatic compared to the US. There are periodic waves but I tend to miss out of them - I suspect because Canada works hard to prevent dumb auto-dialers from working.
It's mind-boggling that the United States allows this kind of thing to happen.
In the EU I get maybe one spam call every couple of months. From the stories you hear from Americans on HN, Americans get multiple spam/scam calls a day, and the vast majority of their inbound calls are spam/scams.
What is going wrong in the US that isn't going wrong in the EU? Language barrier? Regulatory capture?
I live in a central European country and receive 0-2 spam calls per month. And that's because my phone number was used by someone else before (it's a company phone).
I remember back when I lived in the US, I got daily spam calls. I never get spam calls in Europe. I wonder why that is and if that's still the case (lived there between 2014 and 2018)
I got a “new” number when I moved to Canada. The ONLY calls I receive (about 2 per week) are robo call spam / scams. The messages repeat once in English and then in mandarin. (It’s a Vancouver number.. only logic I can see).
Most of the time they go straight to voicemail and leave the same message.
All my real friends FaceTime, signal, iMessage, etc.
It bewilders me that telcos haven’t done anything about this. It’s 100% of my incoming calls... and they only about 2 unique actual messages, pre recorded...
Mexico too. Before the pandemic I had a few spam calls a month, but now there were days when I received 20-50 from a misconfigured call center automatic caller.
It forced me to silence all calls from strangers. We have laws and a system to block and report spam callers, but it seems they don't work anymore.
Here's the thing, where I live (Canada) spam calls have become so bad that (unless you're in my contacts already) I almost never answer the phone. The scams aren't even in English most of the time :/
Actually it's filtered so that only 3 or so of my contacts get through the dnd.
*Scheduled calls / expected calls from specific companies are my one exception.
Now we need to go after the robocall spammers. They waste so much time of so many people -- worse that email spammers. I swear they are doing +1B of spam calls per month in North America.
I moved from NL to Canada. There. are. so. many. spam. calls. here. The idea of telcos by law being required to actively block reported spam numbers is literally foreign here.
International carriers still interconnect with a us carrier to deliver the calls. Spam is really easy to detect. Short call durations and lots of different call to numbers.
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