Why The Robocall Plague Seems To Only Be Getting Worse

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.