The Robocall Geography Tax: Why Your Zip Code Determines Your Spam Reality (2025)

A few bits about this:

I was curious whether or not phone spam (telemarketing, robocall, unsolicited calls) were evenly distributed across the U.S. or not. As it turns out, not (normed by population).

I've been looking into and thinking of possible mitigations to phone spam. One of those ideas was bonding, though I'd considered it applied to telephone networks (companies, networks, and providers, whether providing services to the receiving caller, originating caller, or transit networks between the two). It turns out that California requires a $100,000 bond to telemarketers themselves ... and it seems to work quite well.

Reporting from some sources, most notably the FCC's annual Do Not Call Databook[1], provide information of little or no practical use, given that they focus on reports rather than instances of phone spam. As the KarmaCall article makes clear, regions with the highest levels of phone spam have the lowest report rates, and vice versa.

The FCC's report says FAR more about the effectiveness of local mitigations on phone spam than it does on the objective levels in different parts of the country. It also suggests that present phone-spam regulations and legislation are grossly inadequate at a national level, though some states and locales do have relatively effective countermeasures. The Southeastern US (TX, OK, AR, AL, AR, MS, TN, FL, GA, SC, NC) are exceptionally bad.[2]

Given that it's possible to 1) choose an arbitrary area code for a new phone number, 2) that blocking "neighbor" calls is possible under some telco's call filtering[3], and 3) that phone spam incidence varies greatly by area code, choosing a service number in a low-spam remote area code and blocking unknown calls from that area code ... might be an effective mitigation technique.

There've been several recent FCC requests for comments on robocalls and phone spam, most of which are now closed to my knowledge. That said, I'm looking for ongoing substantive discussion on the topic, see my Mastodon/Fediverse thread here:

<https://mastodon.social/@dredmorbius@toot.cat/11698405157843...>

Notes:

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1. For 2025: <https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/DNC-Data-Book-2...>

2. For a better map, see <https://www.whistleout.com/CellPhones/Guides/robocall-epidem...>. And yeah, that Karmacall map/graphic is clearly AI slop with multiple states mislabeled / unlabeled.

3. See for example Verizon's "Call Filter", "Neighborhood Filter" feature: <https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-238154/>.