The last week I’ve noticed an increase in robocalls… with a *major* increase in the past couple days. I’ve been getting three or four a day telling me that I can lower my credit card rates. There have been at least five calls just today from the same number with a badly-grammared robot telling me that the Social Security Administration is going to delete my account, or some such rubbish. There may have been more calls, but I’ve shut the damn thing off. I was wondering if there was something special about my phone, but… nope. It’s an epidemic.

By the time you finish this article, 400K Americans were probably robocalled

In short: technology has made it stupid easy for robocallers to annoy hundreds of thousands of people at virtually no expense. bonus: something like 40% of all robocalls are attempts at fraud. Here’s a tip: if your phone is registered at the National Do Not Call Registry, then lawful telemarketers will not call you. Any telemarketing call you do get, then, is almost certainly a scammer.

Spam killed Usenet. It  might end up killing the telephone.