You pick up the phone and hear, “We’ve been trying to reach you concerning your vehicle’s extended warranty.” It’s a pre-recorded message, and it instructs you to press a certain number or stay on the line.
Don’t fall for it. It’s probably a scam.
More than 2 million individual consumer complaints have been filed in the past eight years with the Consumer Help Center from the Federal Communications Commission, which handles a wide range of telecommunications service and billing issues.
Unwanted calls are the single largest source for those complaints.
At least 55% of all the reports filed to the FCC are due to unwanted calls, including telemarketing and robocalls, according to a USA TODAY analysis.
See if someone’s complained about a number
If you cannot see a data search tool below, click here.
The searchable database above reflects 808,342 unwanted calls consumers reported to the FCC in the past eight years.
Those represent only 60% of all unwanted call complaints because many phone customers did not report a number from caller ID. Factoring in repeats for the same phone line, the database contains 551,345 unique numbers.
Being listed in the database doesn’t necessarily mean a caller is up to no good. The FCC doesn’t investigate or resolve those individual complaints but instead uses them to help inform FCC enforcement and policy work.
Nonetheless, a robocall trying to sell something via consumers’ wireless or wireline phones is always illegal…
