How many spam calls have you gotten so far today? Unwanted robocalls are Americans’ number one consumer complaint, and that has CBS News California investigative correspondent Julie Watts asking: What’s being done to stop them?<\/p>\n
Whether they’re pushing payday loans, sketchy charities or they’re just a straight-up scam, robocalls aren’t just annoying. If that automated voice is asking you for money, odds are that it’s illegal.<\/p>\n
Once a world traveler working on development projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, Julie Heifetz feels like her new full-time project is fielding spam calls.<\/p>\n
“I get so many. I say, ‘Damn it, it’s another robocall!’ ” Heifetz said.<\/p>\n
In 2010, we first asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) why putting your number on a do-not-call list didn’t seem to work.<\/p>\n
“If you didn’t have a do-not-call list, it would be even worse,” the FCC said then.<\/p>\n
Well, today, it is worse. During the first nine months of 2025, there were 40.8 billion robocalls, according to data from YouMail<\/a>, a visual voicemail and spam blocking service. That’s up 5% from the same period last year.<\/p>\n Most violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which makes it illegal to make unsolicited automated or pre-recorded calls.<\/p>\n “It’s still happening because it’s really hard to track these people down,” said Mike Mizenko with Nomorobo, one of a growing number of companies that deploy technology to help consumers block unwanted calls. “They’re using all sorts of new technology all the time. They’re very creative.”<\/p>\n We first featured Nomorobo over a decade ago when they won the Federal Trade Commission’s robocall blocking challenge. Their technology has come a long way, but so have the scammers.<\/p>\n So Nomorobo is taking a new approach, with Mizenko saying the company has “filed four lawsuits in a couple of different federal courts.”<\/p>\n Nomorobo tracked and recorded thousands of robocalls using their own network of more than a quarter million unused phone lines, essentially a huge “honeypot” built to catch robocallers in real time.<\/p>\n “We have this data. We know it’s real. We can prove everything we allege,” Mizenko said.<\/p>\n The company sued some of the bad actors, who so far have mostly been debt collectors.<\/p>\n “We can kind of make a statement and say, ‘Hey. We’re watching. We know what you’re doing. We can prove what you are doing. You need to clean up your practices,’ ” Mizenko said.<\/p>\n California Attorney General Rob Bonta has taken legal action, too, joining a multi-state lawsuit against Avid Telecom<\/a> for making billions of illegal robocalls.<\/p>\n