How Robocallers profit even if You Don’t Answer

-Source-The Wall Street Journal-

Caller ID is feeding one of the very problems it was developed to stop: junk calls.

Illegitimate robocallers, or outfits that flood American landlines with marketing calls, use the decades-old identification system to make money, even when no one picks up.

While scammers’ biggest paydays come from tricking victims into handing over credit card or bank account information, many robocallers make incremental cash along the way, thanks to little-known databases that try to identify who is calling. Each time a caller’s name is displayed, phone companies pay small fees—typically fractions of pennies—to databases that store such records. Some of these fees are handed back to the caller. With millions of automated calls a day, the amounts can add up.

“It’s slow nickels, not fast dimes” for scammers, but it helps offset the costs of making the calls, said Aaron Woolfson, president of TelSwitch Inc., a company that licenses out telecommunications-billing software. While mobile phones have replaced traditional phones in many households, about 121 million landline connections exist in U.S. homes, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Those landlines are increasingly on the receiving end of robocalls masquerading as telemarketers, the Internal Revenue Service or immigration officials.

It is difficult to quantify the number of robocalls that landlines receive, but mobile applications aimed at detecting and blocking robocallers offer a glimpse of the problem’s scale. Hiya, one of hundreds of apps with call-blocking features, tracked nearly 5 billion robocalls made to U.S. cellphones in the first quarter of 2018, a 10% increase from the year-earlier period. Many robocallers have gotten more sophisticated by “spoofing” or making up the caller ID a recipient sees on their cellphone or landline. In the case of so-called neighbor spoofing, robocallers match their number to a local area code to encourage victims to answer. Americans made hundreds of complaints about such calls to the FCC in the first five months of the year, according to an agency spokesman, double those made in the same period last year. Read more