T-Mobile says it helped customers block 21 billion scams, spam marketing, and flooding bot calls this year through the free Scam Shield Bot Phone/Fraud Protection service. On average, the number of identifications/interceptions is also as high as 1.8 billion per month. In addition, according to data as of early December 2021, the operator found that the full-time traffic of fraudulent calls has rushed to an all-time high. This year's growth has exceeded 116% compared to 2020, reaching approximately 425 million passes per week.
(From T-Mobile)
Last year, T-Mobile claimed that the Scam Shield protection service detected/blocked approximately 12 billion scam calls in 2019. And in 12 months, about 30 million Americans were the victims of scam calls.
In this week's Fraud & Harassment Call Report 2021, T-Mobile revealed some new data:
From the beginning of 2021 to early December, Scam Shield identified/blocked more than 21 billion such calls to T-Mobile and Metro customers.
● January 2021 had the lowest volume of fraudulent calls, with 1.1 billion calls injured on labels suspected of being fraudulent calls.
● Traffic in November 2021 grew exponentially, more than doubling from the beginning of the year to 2.5 billion passes.
More than half of those 21 billion calls were linked to false vehicle warranty fraud, and the rest common routines include pretending to be a social security office (10 percent), wireless carriers (9 percent), car insurance companies (6 percent), and courier services (4 percent).
Geographically, the most popular targets for scammers throughout 2021 are mainly victims of Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Georgia, especially the Dallas/Fort Worth area code.
In March, AT&T disclosed that its ActiveArmor Proactive Defense service had detected/blocked more than 1.6 billion harassing calls since 2016, with an average of 17 million detected per day in 2020.
In June, Verizon also disclosed that its Call Filter call filtering feature helped protect 78 million customers from more than 13 billion harassing calls.