An estimated 30 billion”robo-calls” 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 — a 34 percent increase from April of 2017.
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. People with the 712 area code code got nearly 9.9 million robocalls 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.
(A previous version of this story did not include data for the 563 area code.)