Following up on my blog post related to the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) prohibition on illegal sales calls and robocalls, today the FTC issued its National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for Fiscal Year 2017.  Now in its ninth year, the 2017 fiscal year Data Book contains “statistical data about phone numbers on the Registry, telemarketers and sellers accessing phone numbers on the Registry, and complaints consumers submit to the FTC about telemarketers allegedly violating the Do Not Call rules.”  New this year, according to the FTC, is a breakdown of robocalls versus live calls, information about the topic of those calls as reported by consumers, and a state-by-state analysis of consumer complaints.

In its press release issued today, the FTC reported that the Registry now contains over 229 million phone numbers and that there were over 7 million consumer complaints about unwanted telemarketing calls in 2017.  Of those, over 4.5 million were complaints about robocalls, which is a marked increase from the prior year.  Notably, the most frequent topic that consumers identified when submitting a robocall complaint was “Reducing Debt,” which accounted for over 700,000 of the complaints received in 2017.

As a reminder, companies should make sure to follow proper procedures when making sales calls, particularly pre-recorded sales calls, to consumers.

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