I follow InsideARM to get a peek at what the telecom industry’s biggest 3rd party lobby is up to. It’s this lobbying group that pushes to keep unfettered robodialing legal on the telecom system. It’s also what is keeping regulators like the FCC from getting in the way of scammers… because debt collectors and scammers are essentially using the same call patterns and it’s hard for carriers to distinguish the two.
Recently the debt collection industry has been panicking about call blocking apps getting more aggressive at what's called "labeling", or allowing users to categorize phone calls they get and block.
https://www.insidearm.com/news/00044703-hiya-says-52-mobile-calls-are-answered-wh/
You can tell right away that the debt collection industry is pissed...
"First Orion was one of the first on the scene. According to their website, they’ve been in the game for 10 years. As the parent company of PrivacyStar, they engaged with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to provide consumer complaints direct from mobile phones to the FTC’s database. Early on, the user could categorize the complaint based on the type of call. The numbers exploded. In January 2012, 389 complaints about debt collection came from PrivacyStar. By 2015 the number averaged 74,800 per month (yes, you read the numbers right). An early 2013 study by insideARM of the accuracy of complaints revealed that PrivacyStar data was far from definitive. We have not repeated the study, but the data quality has no doubt improved since then.
It was also uncovered a few years ago that PrivacyStar was funneling TCPA leads to plaintiffs’ attorneys, including Sergei Lemberg. First Orion representatives have told insideARM that this practice stopped a long time ago."
Call blocker apps now seem to have the upper hand on the entire debt collection industry. Debt collectors aren't paying the app makers any money, so it seems the only blockers that are working with them are Hiya. Likewise, Hiya has pretty much reduced itself down to just a fancier form of call identification and it's not much of a blocker beyond your phone's own blacklist feature.
Nomorobo, the largest app by install base in the US doesn't seem to have a similar relationship with the collections industry like Hiya does---since Nomo blocks all of Portfolio Recovery 200+ DID numbers.
I think it's interesting that some of the app makers early-on were forwarding TCPA violations directly to attorneys for solicitation. TCPA lawyers (that is, lawyers who have a side gig filing TCPA lawsuits against robocallers) have also deployed SEO and have put up debt collection firms phone numbers.
Another interesting article I found at InsideARM talks about how scammers call volumes are so high that they are now pushing a majority of phone users into whitelisting, either mentally or with software, which is an accurate statement I think. Neighbor spoofing used to get people but the trend has now closed people down into only trusting numbers that are directly on their contact lists and nobody else.
Debt collectors have no way around whitelisting other than just banging the crap out of your telephone, so this has started an arms race between debt collectors and scammers to repeatedly dial the same number excessively hoping for a pickup.
What's infuriating about this is that phonemakers, particularly Apple and Google with their OSes will still not allow calls to be terminated before the phone-ring event bubbles up the stack before your phone dial app reacts to it. Google put out an update to Android 8.1 that actually shut out some access to the Phone API that impacted Malwarebytes (so no more scanning links inside text message to block scams).
I suspect that debt collectors are desperate to keep call blocking apps from killing a phone ring event completely, because if that happens then call blocker apps would be super-useful as they could kill calls and your phone shows no sign of reaction... no quick vibrate and not being thrown out of whatever app you were in to see the one second ring/terminate of a call that the robokilling app rejected.
If that happened then debt collectors would be fully-closed off from dialing for good and likewise so would scammers.