Robocall Complaints Jumped in FY 2025 After Years of Declines: FTC
There were 258.5 million telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry as of Sept. 30, up roughly 4.8 million from the same time a year earlier, the FTC said this week in its biennial DNC Registry report to Congress. The agency said consumer complaints about illegal calls, particularly illegal robocalls, jumped in FY 2025 after steady declines from FY 2017-24. The number of robocall complaints averaged about 133,000 monthly in FY 2025, compared with about 92,000 a month in FY 2024, it said. Despite the uptick, the complaints remain "substantially down" from their FY 2017 peak.
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That decrease is attributable in part to the FTC's enforcement strategies, it said, such as pursuing VoIP providers that facilitate illegal calls. Since 2003, the commission has filed 173 lawsuits against 570 companies and 449 individuals for allegedly making billions of unwanted telemarketing calls. It has collected nearly $400 million from those violators, the FTC said.
The report also recapped FCC efforts to tackle illegal robocalls, as the agency is increasingly focused on addressing the issue "at every point in the call path." The FTC mentioned the FCC's October call branding NPRM (see 2510280024) and the idea of deterring use of U.S. area codes by overseas callers.