As part of their ongoing monitoring of phone threats, Pindrop Labs tracks common scams targeting consumers, such as recent IRS or technical support scams. These attacks have successfully defrauded millions, particularly consumers in vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, immigrants and young college students. Robocalling services, which provide a cheap method to make thousands of calls per day, have increased in frequency to one in every six phone numbers calling the average consumer, with 2.5% of U.S. phones (8.1 million in total) receiving at least one robocall per week.

One key report finding stated that on average, large financial institutions exposed more than $9 million in funds to attackers last year. Banks experience a fraud call rate of one in every 2,650 calls, while brokerages report slightly less, with only one in 3,000 calls being fraud. Attackers use VoIP lines for 53% of their calls, compared to 7.8% of the general public who use VoIP as a means for phone communication.

The FBI has also been warning individuals about scammers who will do just about anything to obtain personal financial information, including pretending to be law enforcement.

In fact, an old scam is reemerging in which the caller claims the targeted victim failed to report for jury duty. The caller claims there is now an arrest warrant out, but tells the individual he or she can get out of the arrest by verifying personal information. The scammer might go even further and demand that the person pay up by providing a credit card number or buy a prepaid card and share the account number with the scammer.

The jury duty scam has been around since 2005 or earlier, but people continue to get calls. Another variation of this scam involves criminals posing on the phone as debt collectors or phony IRS agents, or pretending to protect consumers from credit card fraud.