The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released its annual report to Congress detailing consumer complaints and enforcement actions in connection with illegal robocalls.
Released at the end of December 2024, the report offers insight into trends related to informal consumer complaints regarding robocalls that were received by the Commission over five full calendar years, from 2019-2023.
Over the five-year period covered in this report, the FCC received a total of 1,351,317 informal consumer complaints under four different provisions of the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act (TRACED Act). The total number of informal complaints during the most recent five-year reporting period represents a nominal increase over the 1,341,635 informal complaints received during calendar years 2018-2022.
As in the prior five-year reporting period, the largest number of complaints filed (571,818, or 42.3%) were for violations of the FCC’s restrictions on sales calls made to residential telephone numbers (section 227(c)), while an additional 291,439 (21.6%) were filed for providing misleading or inaccurate caller identification information (section 227(e))
Despite the nominal increase in the total number of informal complaints filed over the most recent five-year period, the report confirms that the FCC’s stepped-up enforcement efforts over the past several years are continuing to have a positive impact in reducing the number of informal consumer complaints. After a record 333,146 informal complaints filed in 2018, annual informal complaint numbers have generally seen marked declines, with just 169,465 informal complaints filed in 2022, and only 135,268 complaints filed in all of 2023.
The text of the FCC’s Annual Report on robocalls is available at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-408475A1.pdf.
