Statewide Iowa — People with telephones in the 712 area code, which covers roughly the western third of Iowa, got nearly 10-million robocalls so far this year.
A robocall is an automated telephone call initiated by an autodialer for delivery of a prerecorded message. Some of these calls are legitimate, many are scams, and all are annoying.
An estimated 30 billion”robocalls” were made in the U.S. last year and so far this year, the pace of these nuisance calls in Iowa and the rest of the country is dramatically accelerating.
According to YouMail.com, 3.3 billion automated robocalls were made in the U.S. in April, which is a 34-percent increase from April of 2017.
Here in the 712 area code code we got nearly 9.9-million robocalls.The area code in Iowa getting the most automated calls is the 515. So far this year, there have been more than 33-million robocalls to phones with a 515 area code. In the 319 area code, there have been nearly 19-million robocalls this year and there’s been nearly 12-million into the 563 area code and in the 641 area code there were about 6.2-million .
By YouMail.com’s calculation, people with one of the five Iowa area codes got more than 135-million robocalls in 2017. A small percentage are legitimate, like pharmacies notifying patients they can pick up a prescription, but the vast majority are recorded messages from spammers and scammers.
