Your phone rings. Thinking it could be important, you take the call, expecting another human being on the other end of the line.
Instead, you’re greeted with a lifeless automated voice warning of “suspicious” purchases or an unpaid Internal Revenue Service debt.
The scale of America’s robocall epidemic is staggering, with 4.3 billion calls placed in July alone, according to YouMail, one of the largest robocall-blocking companies. Bad actors use computers and auto-dialers to generate robocalls, playing a pre-recorded or artificial voice message to many people at once, often to steal personal information or money from unsuspecting Americans, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Victims of scam calls lost an average of $3,690 in the first half of 2025, while victims of scam texts lost an average of $1,452 during the same timeframe, according to the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, a consumer advocacy group.
Despite the problem’s scale, the federal government and telecommunications industry have so far failed to find a silver bullet — instead playing a “large-scale game of whack-a-mole.”
“Robocalls are generally trending lower (year over year — like 2026 vs. 2025), but up (month over month, since roughly October),” YouMail CEO Alex Quilici told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
June represents the highest monthly robocall volume since July 2025; however, over the past 12 months, robocalls reached 48.7 billion, which amounts to the lowest 12-month total recorded since 2022, according to YouMail. Roughly 142 million robocalls were made per day in June.
“You can correlate drops over the past few years directly with enforcement actions. These actions are usually against the people making robocalls and the carriers they use,” Quilici said. “The more enforcement actions, the bigger the downward pressure on robocalls.”
“It’s a bit of large scale whack-a-mole. And the enforcers have the disadvantage of having to follow the law when they investigate, while the robocallers tend to be able to move quickly and don’t care about the law,” he explained.
The federal government’s inability to curtail robocalls and other similar scams is landing poorly with the American public.
At least 68% of adults think the government is poorly fighting online scams and attacks, and 56% dislike technology companies’ failure to prevent online scams and attacks, per a Pew Research poll unveiled in July 2025. Pew Research includes scam emails, text messages, and calls as part of online scams and attacks.
Twenty-four percent of U.S. adults said they received a scam email, call, or text that led them to give away personal information, Pew Research said.
Who Is To Blame?
While advocacy groups and lawmakers agree that the robocall crisis needs to be remedied, the solutions range, as does the suspected culprit.
The U.S. PIRG Education Fund said 44% of phone companies did not comply with anti-robocall mitigation policies, while government officials say that the rise of digital phone networks has made it easier than ever for bad actors to conduct robocall scams. The group also points to artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging threat, which allows bots to send fraudulent callsto thousands every day.
The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) in September 2025 called for legislation or federal rulemaking to hold Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers — companiesthat deliver communication services over the internet — accountable for reducing scam calls and texts.
The organization calls for restricting VoIP providers’access to American phone networks unless they obtain a bond that they would risk losing if theyvouch for fake caller IDs.
A Verizon spokesperson referred the DCNF to a company press release on how to stay ahead of scammers, while an AT&T spokesperson pointed to a document outlining the company’s efforts to fight fraud.
“T-Mobile is committed to stopping illegal and unwanted robocalls. We invest significant resources to protect customers — stopping billions of scam and spam calls each year, working to prevent bad actors from misusing our network to transmit illegal traffic, and helping legitimate calls get through while blocking those that are not,” a T-Mobile spokesperson told the DCNF.
T-Mobile uses advanced technologies to identify, label and block scam and illegal robocalls, the spokesperson said. The company offers a Scam Shield protection program alerting users when one receives or places a call likely to be a scam, the T-Mobile spokesperson said.
“Protecting customers from illegal robocalls requires continued coordination across industry, government and law enforcement. T-Mobile remains committed to strengthening those efforts and giving customers tools that help keep them protected,” the company said.
The advent of digital phone networks has become a double-edged sword, one Federal Communications Commission (FCC) official told the DCNF.
“It’s beneficial for consumers because it’s brought the cost of calls down. But, at the same time, it’s the exact reason why bad actors are able to get into the network and put calls onto it,” the official explained. “So, ironically, it’s because of IP that we had an increase in robocalls.”
The NCLC in 2025 urged the FCC not to roll back telemarketer “do-not-call” list requirements and allow Americans to automatically opt-out of pre-recorded calls.
“Consumers and small business owners should never be subjected to unstoppable telemarketing and other robocalls,” Patrick Crotty, a senior attorney at the NCLC, said in October 2025.
The FCC ultimately scrapped its proposal, according to Privacy World, a news outlet created by Squire Patton Boggs, an international law firm.
What Your Government Is Doing About It
While Capitol Hill tries chipping away at the crisis with a mixed bag of bills, the FCC has worked to battle robocalls with its own limited set of tools.
Sens. Ted Budd and Peter Welch unveiled the Foreign Robocall Elimination Act in August 2025, which now sits in the House after passing through the Senate. The bill would require a voice service provider (VSP), or any telephone service that routes calls over the internet instead of traditional telephone lines, to post a bond up to $100,000 before filing a certification to the FCC’s Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD). The agency requires VSPs to submit their plans to reduce robocalls to the database.
“Requiring providers to obtain bonds before being certified on the Robocall Mitigation Database is just one of several avenues to ensure greater compliance. The bill intentionally has a multipronged approach to disincentivize foreign robocalls and better protect Americans, including a public-private task force to identify tools for deterrence and immunity for receiving, sharing, and publishing illegal calls from the Industry Traceback group,” Budd told the DCNF in a written statement.
The legislation also establishes an interagency task force comprising the FCC, FTC, the Justice Department and experts to find the most effective solutions to combat robocalls.
“Ultimately, the goal is to enact solutions like bonds and greater protections, while also tasking experts both in and outside the government to develop additional tools to better protect the privacy and security of Americans,”Budd added.
The legislation is catching the eye of key trade groups.
“We’re supportive” of the Foreign Robocall Elimination Act, Josh Bercu, the senior vice president of policy for USTelecom, the trade association for broadband providers, said in an interview with the DCNF.
The bill would make it harder for bad actors to create “shell U.S. voice service provider companies,” Bercu explained.
“I think that bond requirements for certifying carriers generally seem like a good idea and part of the solution,” Alan Butler, the executive director and president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told the DCNF. He added that increasing “legal and monetary accountability” can help properly vet phone traffic.
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) lists the Foreign Robocall Elimination Act as one its legislative priorities for the 119th Congress.
The legislation lacks “strong opposition,” making it “one of the most promising anti-robocall bills in Congress,” the Blacklist Alliance, a firm that helps businesses navigate telemarketing regulations, says.
Ben Ray Lujan, a Democratic senator from New Mexico, introduced a bill of his own in March 2025, enabling the FCC to pursue certain unpaid robocall-related fines. Giving the FCC the authority to collect the fines could provide another incentive to deter bad actors, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) argues.
The first Trump administration enacted legislation to increase enforcement and implement technology standards to fight robocalls, while the Biden administration drastically ramped up enforcement, although it struggled to collect finds — an issue plaguing President Donald Trump’s FCC.
Trump hasn’t enacted any robocall legislation since 2019, when he signed the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act into law. That bill, sponsored by Sen. John Thune, mandates voice service providers implement caller ID authentication technology to combat spoofing — where a bad actor disguises his or her caller ID information to scam everyday people.
The FCC established the robocall database as part of implementing the TRACED Act.
The Thune-backed bill’s proponents say it has massively reduced scam robocall volume, with Bercu telling Congress in 2025 that the number of calls was down 30% from their peak in March 2021. However, as YouMail data shows, robocall volume remains stubbornly high. The implementation of this caller ID authentication technology reduced spoofed, illegal and high-volume robocalls by roughly 11% from 2021 to 2022, according to the CRS.
President Joe Biden’s FCC leveraged the TRACED Act to crack down on robocalls, handing down nine-figure fines to companies.
The Biden FCC levied a record $300 million fine against an “auto warranty robocall operation” run by an international network of shell companies, a $225 million fine against a Texas-based health insurance telemarketer for reportedly making one billion spoofed robocalls, and a $116 million fine against a company that sought to make money off of toll free calls.
But it remains unclear if the fines were ever collected. Neither the FCC nor the Justice Department collected any of the penalties issued in 2023.
The FCC has the authority to impose civil fines for illegal calls and texts, but it must refer cases to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for litigation and collection rates remain low, according to the CRS. DOJ only pursues a fraction of the FCC-referred fines and often cannot find the parties in question, as 90% of robocalls, both legal and illegal, originate overseas.
The second Trump administration has focused its energy on making it easier to identify and block bad actors.
“Fighting illegal robocalls remains the FCC’s top consumer protection priority,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a July statement.
The FCC voted that month to tighten who can access the agency’s robocall database.
“The database has become a key instrument for the Commission to find and remove bad actors in the voice network,” the FCC stated.
Carr noted in July that the agency removed 1,400 phone providers last summer due to deficiencies in their filings.
Other potential solutions involve making upgrades to America’s dated infrastructure.
The commission adopted an order that would help transition phone networks’ copper networks to modern fiber optic lines. A revamped phone network would make it easier for companies to combat robocalls, an FCC official told DCNF, noting that copper lines make it more difficult for phone carriers to transmit data needed to help prevent fraud, the FCC official said.
“The Commission is looking to combat robocalls at every point in the call path, and the various proceedings that we have open on that are really meant to tackle the issue at every point and prevent and close any loopholes that are out there, and prevent new loopholes from opening up,” the FCC official said.
“It’s really a comprehensive effort,” the official added.
Carriers have invested in call blocking, labeling and authentication tools, Cara Duckworth, the senior vice president of communications for USTelecom, told the DCNF.
“There’s a lot of good work being done between the industry and the FCC and FTC and other government agencies to help fight the problem,” Duckworth said.
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