WASHINGTON—Complaints related to robocalls and unwanted live telemarketing callas have decreased to a five-year low, according to the newly released National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for Fiscal Year 2023 from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The release comes at the same time the credit union trade groups have been engaged with the FTC and Congress over various pieces of robocall-related legislation.
Now in its fifteenth year of publication, the FTC said the data book also provides the most recent fiscal year information available on robocall complaints, the types of calls consumers reported to the FTC, and a complete state-by-state analysis.
According to the Data Book, complaints about imposter calls again topped the list, with more than 175,000 received during the fiscal year ending on Sept. 30, 2023, 117,000 of which were robocalls. Those calls generally involved imposters falsely posing as representatives of government, such as the Social Security Administration or the IRS, legitimate business entities or as people affiliated with them, the FTC said.
Nearly 250-Million Registered Numbers
The FTC’s National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry lets consumers add their phone number and choose not to receive most legal telemarketing calls. In the last fiscal year, more than 2.6 million people signed up with the DNC Registry, bringing the total to more than 249 million actively registered phone numbers, up from 246.8 million at the end of FY 2022, the FTC said.
According to the FTC, the overall number of complaints continued its decline in FY 2023, down more than 900,000 from FY 2022. The number of consumer complaints decreased for most topics, including warranties and protection plans, the second largest topic the past several years, which saw a decrease of more than 84% from FY 2022.
In FY 2023, the FTC said it received 1.2 million complaints about robocalls, down from 1.8 million in FY 2022.
Second Year in a Row
“This is the second year in a row the number of robocalls reported has decreased. For every month in the fiscal year, robocalls—defined under FTC regulations as calls delivering a prerecorded message—made up the majority of consumer complaints about DNC violations,” the FTC said.
Calls about medical and prescription issues comprised the second-most commonly reported topic, with consumers filing more than 142,000 complaints. Complaints about supposed debt-reduction made up the third-most commonly reported topic, followed by complaints about energy, solar, and utilities and warranties and protection plans.
The Leading States
Meanwhile, New Hampshire continues to top the nation in active DNC registrations per capita. The top five states reporting the most DNC complaints per 100,000 people in FY 2023 were Delaware, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada and Illinois, the FTC said.
The underlying data in the report are publicly available on the FTC’s website.
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