The Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call Registry still has good intentions. It was built 23 years ago and gives people an easy way to opt out of legitimate sales calls. At least that was the original idea.
Register your number online or by phone and miraculously, telemarketers are legally required to stop contacting you within 31 days. You shouldn’t have to think twice about accepting a random call after all is said and done.
More than 258 million phone numbers are now on that list: a record high. And yet, complaints about unwanted calls jumped more than 25% in a single year, reaching 2.6 million in fiscal year 2025.
Fraud-protection technology can’t keep up. That alone is worth understanding.
Do Not Call Violations Explained
The FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for 2025 tells a story that does not match the conventional wisdom about robocalls. The simple explanation is that robocalls peaked in 2021 and have been declining ever since. That is partially true; complaints are roughly 48% below the 2021 high of around five million reports. However, the trend reversed sharply last year, with more than 2.6 million complaints filed after a period of relative decline.
One misconception is that the Do Not Call Registry doesn’t actually block caller IDs. It simply tells registered businesses who to skip over.
The top categories driving complaints are unwanted sales calls and registered telemarketing. These are not random nuisance calls. Many of them are deliberately engineered to extract money or personal information from the people who pick up.
A 2026 analysis by All About Cookies mapped the complaint data at the state level and found that the spike is not evenly distributed. Some states saw complaint volumes climb significantly faster than the national average. The violations are concentrated, which matters for anyone trying to determine where enforcement attention should go.
Where Do Not Call Complaints are Surging
Alaska had the fewest Do Not Call complaints out of any state in the US in 2024 at only 233 complaints per 100K. By 2025, this amount had skyrocketed to 583 complaints per 100,000 population, representing an increase of 150%. This increase from one year to the next was much larger than any other state in the nation, but there were plenty of states with massive increases in their numbers of Do Not Call complaints.
Apart from Alaska, several Southern states had the biggest increases in Do Not Call complaints per capita. Alabama saw a rise of 58.8%, Louisiana’s went up by 56.8%, while Mississippi reported an increase of 55.0%. Tennessee was another Southern state reporting a huge 50% increase in complaints from 2024 to 2025. Tennessee had an elevated rate of complaints already in 2024 and increased it to 1,017 per 100,000 population in 2025. This is only beaten by Arizona, which reported 1,028 complaints per 100,000. These are the only two states reporting over 1,000 Do Not Call complaints per 100,000 people.
Where Do Not Call Complaints are Falling
Two states went against the overall trend, experiencing lower rates of complaints per capita in 2025 compared to 2024.
Specifically, Delaware and Rhode Island reported reduced levels of complaints during 2025, even though such a reduction was quite small in terms of percentage points. Namely, complaints per 100,000 individuals declined by 11.6% in Delaware and by 6% in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, the number of complaints still amounted to hundreds per 100,000 people in these states. Such a decline could be associated with improvements in law enforcement activities, changes in patterns of calling, or statistics
The Do Not Call Registry Isn’t a Quick Fix
Registering your number works in a narrow sense: legitimate businesses that access the registry are required to honor it, and most do. The FTC charges telemarketers to access the registry specifically to create accountability. But the callers generating most of the complaints are not legitimate businesses running above-board telemarketing operations. They are bad actors who have no intention of checking the list.
Several structural factors are making this worse. Robocall technology has become significantly cheaper to deploy, meaning the economics of illegal calling have shifted in favor of this. What once required infrastructure and overhead can now be run at scale for very little cost. AI voice technology has compounded the issue by enabling synthetic voices convincing enough to bypass basic screening, and nearly half of Americans say they doubt they could identify an AI-generated call.
Data brokers continue to replenish calling lists even as individuals register with the FTC. A phone number registered on the Do Not Call list can wind up in a data broker’s database, where it gets sold to callers who either do not check the registry or actively ignore it. And a significant share of illegal callers operate internationally, placing them outside the practical reach of U.S. enforcement regardless of how aggressively the FTC pursues domestic violators.
The FTC has not been passive. Since the registry launched in 2003, it has filed 173 lawsuits against 570 companies and 449 individuals, collecting nearly $400 million in penalties. It has increasingly targeted VoIP providers and dialing platforms that provide the infrastructure for illegal robocall campaigns. These are meaningful actions. They have not solved the problem.
The Problem With AI-Enabled Scam Calls
The 2025 complaint spike predates the full deployment of the most sophisticated AI voice technology currently available. It was not designed to stop sophisticated fraud operations via deepfakes, spoofed caller IDs, and internationally hosted infrastructure.
That matters because the calls that generate the most harm, including impersonation scams, fake government agency calls, and fraudulent debt relief offers, depend on convincing the recipient that they are talking to a real person or a legitimate organization. AI voice synthesis has made that task dramatically easier and cheaper.
Consumer awareness helps, but only to a point. People who know to be skeptical of unexpected calls from unfamiliar numbers can be caught off guard by calls that spoof a number they recognize, use a voice that sounds familiar, or arrive with enough personal context to seem credible. Data brokers provide the personal context. AI provides the voice. Spoofing provides the familiar caller ID. The combination is more effective than any of these elements individually.
This is not a theoretical risk. The FTC’s 2024 rule updates specifically addressed AI-enabled scam calls, acknowledging that the technology had already been deployed in real-world fraud. The 2025 complaint data suggests the volume of those calls is increasing.
Putting Scam Prevention in Perspective
Call-blocking apps and carrier-level spam filters have improved substantially and are worth enabling. They are not perfect, but they do reduce call volume meaningfully for most users. Most major carriers now offer some version of this by default or at low cost.
The harder behavioral shift is around what happens when a call does get through. The most effective protection against phone scams is a consistent policy of never providing personal information, financial details, or account credentials to an inbound caller regardless of how legitimate the call seems. If a call claims to be from a government agency, a bank, or a utility and asks for action, hang up and call the organization back using a number from their official website. Scammers can fake caller ID and voices. They cannot intercept a call you initiate yourself.
Screen Unknown Numbers and Never Overshare
The 2025 complaint data does not mean the registry has failed. It means the nature of the problem has changed faster than the tools available to address it. The FTC is adapting, as its recent enforcement actions against VoIP providers and AI-enabled scams show, but the gap between the current regulatory framework and our technological state is real and growing.
Let them speak first and hang up without answering if they try to sell something over the phone or use a suspicious script.
For consumers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: do not assume that being on the Do Not Call list protects you from the calls most likely to cause actual harm. The list stops the salespeople. It does not stop the scammers.
