U.S. consumers received just slightly less than 5 billion robocalls in April, marking a 3 percent increase from March, according to YouMail's latest Robocall Index. April's robocall volume reached its highest number since August of 2023. Additionally, the first four months of 2025 have seen 18.9 billion robocalls, which is an 11.93 percent increase compared to the first four months of 2024.
April averaged 165 million robocalls/day and 1,910 robocalls/second, up 6.5 percent from March's average of 155 million robocalls/day and 1,794 robocalls/second. That's also a 12.3 percent increase on a year-over-year basis from April 2024.
"We're seeing robocalls continue to trend higher in 2025, after a long stretch of being stable or trending down," said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. "The robocall problem clearly hasn't been solved, and there's still a need for apps and services that protect consumers."
The good news from April is that scam calls dropped by almost 9% for the month. However, the bad news is that the damage from those scam calls continue to be considerable.
For the first quarter of 2025, the FTC estimated a loss of $280 million to scams starting with a phone call. Given YouMail's estimate of 1.9 billion scam calls for the quarter, this suggests an average reported loss of approximately 15 cents per call. Extrapolating for April, this suggests at least $90 million-$100 million of scam losses that started with a phone call.
The other bad news in April is that telemarketing calls increased by 6.5 percent to more than 2 billion, a significant increase of 33 percent year over year. Combined, April saw 2.7 billion telemarketing and scam robocalls in the month, making up 54 percent of all robocalls in the month.
The most problematic robocall campaign in April is around consolidation loans, like calls from this number. The messages are roughly:
"This is Samantha from Easy Loan Solutions. I have an important update regarding your $25,000 consolidation loan pre-approval offer. To speak with us and finalize your application, press 1 now. If you no longer wish to proceed with this offer, you cannot process the offer outside. You must press 1 to be removed. Keep in mind, your $25,000 offer expires at the end of April. To get your loan processed as soon as possible, press 1 now."
This call campaign was problematic because of a high volume of calls, in the tens of millions in April, originating from tens of thousands of different numbers. Based on consumer feedback, they appeared to target people who never contacted the company or requested a call, and they called individuals multiple times per day, each time from a different number.
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Editor's note: I think I've received 90 percent of these calls. Every day I am bombarded with 10 or more scam calls originating from contact centers in India looking to help me make sure that I am getting all that I deserve from Medicare (and I'm not even on Medicare). All of these calls are using illegal robodialers and phone number spoofing. My number is on the National Do Not Call registry, and so I report each of these calls to the Federal Trade Commission, which is either unwilling or powerless to do anything to put a stop to this. Something needs to be done to address this very serious problem. As the U.S. government negotiates with the government of India over tariffs, maybe foreign aid and tariffs could be used to force the Indian government to crack down on the contact centers engaging in these scams.