If you’ve become the target of spam recently, you’re not alone. From text messages and phone calls to emails, virtually every form of spam is on the rise.
“There’s a large number of actors all over the world trying to squeeze spam into the network from almost an infinite number of entry points all the time,” Will Maxson, assistant director of the FTC’s division of marketing practices, told Axios.
Unwanted text messages have become especially problematic: Robokiller reported more than 11 billion spam texts last month alone (that’s nearly 42 messages per person), and Americans have collectively lost as much as $131 million as a result.
So what’s behind this broad uptick? According to Axios, the pandemic has made all of us easy targets because it has increased our reliance on communicating digitally, whether by text or email. Plus, it has just become even more of a challenge to avoid them as scammers become savvier by doing things like mimicking their targets’ own phone numbers and getting them to click on malicious links.
Social media is no exception either: More than one in four Americans who reported losing money to fraud in 2021 said it began on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Regulators have been tamping down on certain kinds of spam, like robocalls, by working with cell phone providers, but cracking down on the number of texts has proved to be even more of a challenge due to the sheer volume of them that are sent out by scammers. There are some proposals to help with this, including one that would require wireless providers to block illegal text messages.
As regulators and service providers struggle to address the issue, RoboKiller compiled a breakdown of the states where spam texts have become especially problematic. These are the states that got the most spam texts in the month of March:
1. California: 1,272,502,265
2. Texas: 1,169,306,186
3. New York: 961,514,894
4. Florida: 700,163,057
5. Pennsylvania: 456,988,722
6. Illinois: 453,408,869
7. Ohio: 410,930,290
8. Michigan: 391,806,787
9. New Jersey: 336,509,038
10. Georgia: 335,025,970
