Robocalls were more intrusive than ever last year, jumping a whopping 56.8% over the previous year, according to a new robocall report from robocall blocking provider YouMail. Robocalls totaled 47.8 billion, researchers said.

The major problem, to no one’s surprise, involved robocalls related to scams and telemarketing. The YouMail research put the number of scam or telemarketing robocalls at 27 billion last year.

The scams ran across several industries, according to YouMail, which listed the top scams for 2018 as: Health/health insurance scams, interest rate scams, student loan scams, easy money scams, search listing scams, home-related scams, travel scams, tax scams, business-related scams and warranty scams, with more than 1 billion robocalls in each of the top five categories.

“It’s astonishing how many robocalls were made nationwide in 2018,” said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici, in a prepared statement. “We’re now talking about 150 or more robocalls for every adult in the U.S. over the course of the year, and many of these robocallers are unwanted scammers trying to trick people out of their money or personal data.”
Atlanta was the municipality receiving the most robocalls in 2018, with just under 2.1 billion. Other cities with more than 1 billion robocalls received were: Dallas (1.8 billion), New York (1.7 billion), Los Angeles (1.6 billion), Chicago (1.6 billion), Houston (1.5 billion), and Baltimore (1.1 billion).

The 404 area code in Atlanta was the area code that received the most robocalls in 2018, with 927 million. According to the report, six other area codes exceeded 500 million robocalls: the 204 (Dallas, 727 million), the 832 (Houston, 716 million), the 678 (Atlanta, 653 million), the 954 (Fort Lauderdale, 570 million), the 917 (New York City, 546 million), and the 310 (Los Angeles, 508 million).

With One Call Networks and our VoIP service, there are a few things that you can do to directly block those calls once you have I’d the number.