Over 250 million spam numbers have been logged – and nuisance calls just keep increasing, despite federal crackdown

No, we don’t want an extended auto warranty – and please stop calling us.

That was the message from Americans to spam callers in 2025, nearly 260 million times over. The Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from unfair business practices, reported Tuesday that people have filed more than 258 million phone numbers with the National Do Not Call Registry.

Last year’s count was 4.8 million new numbers, 1.9 percent higher than the amount of new numbers logged in 2024, the commission said. The registry exists for reporting unwanted spam calls and also allows people to register their numbers to reduce the volume of sales calls from real, law-abiding companies.

“Americans continue to utilize the Registry in very high numbers,” the FTC wrote. “In the first four days following the launch of the Registry on June 27, 2003, more than 10 million numbers were registered. As of September 30, 2025, the Registry had 258,515,050 active registrations.”

The FTC also shared the top culprits for unwanted telemarketing calls.

The Do Not Call Registry allows consumers to file complaints about specific numbers, too. In 2025, the FTC received more than 2.6 million complaints through the registry. The top offender in those complaints? Robocalls.

In fact, the number of robocall complaints rose slightly this past fiscal year, but remains well below the year before the commission cracked down on robocalls: 2017.

“While the number of complaints about robocalls ticked up in FY 2025, reports remain substantially lower than their peak in FY 2017,” the commission wrote. “This is due to a range of FTC law enforcement strategies, including the pursuit of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers that facilitate illegal calls, according to the report.”

The top states for complaints per 100,000 people were Arizona, Tennessee, Nevada, Illinois, and Florida, the commission noted: