The findings were part of a study by Juniper Research which assessed emerging communications technologies, going through over 10,000 data points across 60 countries. The report found that the amount lost by mobile subscribers to robocall scams could amount to as high as £57 billion by 2027.

This comes on the backdrop of 46% of people in Scotland claiming they have been targeted by a scam in the past year. Of those targeted by scams, 42% were contacted by phone, the second most common platform for attempted scams after emails, according to a report. 

The region most affected by robo-calls is North America since it provides larger monetary opportunities for the fraudsters. According to the Juniper report, over half of the losses experienced in 2023 will happen in North America. 

However, due to a security paradigm called Secure Telephony Identity Revisited and Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (STIR/SHAKEN), the year-on-year growth of robocalling in North America has dropped 85% between 2022 and 2023 according to the report. The STIR/SHAKEN system is a number of security protocols taken to combat caller ID spoofing on public telephone networks.

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While the UK has not adopted STIR/SHAKEN like their North American counterparts, Ofcom – the UK government’s telecommunications regulatory body – has introduced its own techniques to reduce the amount of scam callers.

The UK framework offers non-mandatory guidance for communications providers to execute, trying to avoid the costly mandatory STIR/SHAKEN program which cost an estimated half-billion USD to implement. Ofcom on the other hand, opted to change high level wording on what was mandatory for communications providers, while releasing a suite of optional guidelines that they hope the communications providers will adopt in late 2022.