T-Mobile released its 2021 Scams and Robocalls report, and it says that its Scam Shield service managed to block 21 billion scam calls, which translates to 700 calls identified or blocked every second. The gathered data by T-Mobile shows an over 116% increase in scam call attempts from 2020.
According to the T-Mobile scam call report, the most frequent scam was related to fake vehicle warranties, which accounted for 51% of all the call scams. In other popular scams, the scammers were posing as Social Security office workers (up to 10%) and wireless providers (up to 9%). Scammers also pretended to be employees of car insurance companies (6%) or package delivery companies (4%). There were also cases in which scammers posed as health insurance or health providers, the IRS, or workers from credit card companies.
In its scam call observation, T-Mobile observed that the scammers were working mostly from Monday to Friday, and on the weekends, they didn’t work as hard. It seems that the scammers enjoy some time for themselves on the holidays. This year, Easter (April 4) had the lowest scam attempts of the year. T-Mobile also reported that starting on December 23, the number of call scams began to decline.
Another piece of information that T-Mobile reports in its scam call report is that scammers are more likely to target some areas of the United States more than others. Scammers favored Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Georgia. And the most targeted area codes were in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
In the summer of 2020, T-Mobile released its Scam Shield service. The goal of the Scam Shield was to protect all of T-Mobile’s customers from scam call attacks for free. By using AI to analyze call behavior, T-Mobile constantly improves the protection of its network against scam call attacks.
One of the features that Scam Shield has is scam detection. If Scam Shield detects a scam threat, the customer will be notified immediately. The Scam Shield service gives you the ability to turn off scam calls via Scam Block. Your phone will not even ring if Scam Block is enabled and Scam Shield detects a potential scam call. For more information about T-Mobile’s Scam Shield, visit T-Mobile’s website.
