For one Massachusetts consumer, unwanted loan calls have gone far beyond the occasional annoying interruption. A recent Boston 25 News investigation highlighted a Leominster resident who had accumulated more than 230 unsolicited voicemails and said he was receiving roughly four or five calls a day, sometimes as many as 10. The volume had become significant enough that legitimate calls were getting lost in the noise.
That experience illustrates a larger problem with modern phone spam. Consumers can block one number, then another, then another, but the calls can continue when the people or operations behind them simply use different numbers. What looks like dozens of unrelated callers may actually be part of a much larger calling operation.
Boston 25 spoke with Patrick Crotty, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, about the problem. Crotty focuses on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and related consumer issues, including unwanted and illegal calls. His work at the NCLC includes advocacy concerning consumer protections against scam and unwanted calls.
Patrick Crotty at the National Consumer Law Center
Why Are People Getting Loan Calls They Never Asked For?
One of the unsettling parts of an unwanted loan call is how much the caller may appear to know about you. Hearing your name or other personal information can make an unexpected call seem more legitimate, but possession of personal information should never be confused with proof of identity.
Information used in these campaigns can originate from lead-generation systems, online forms, marketing databases, publicly available information, previous transactions, data breaches, and other sources. Once information enters that ecosystem, consumers may have little visibility into how many companies or individuals ultimately gain access to it.
That is why consumers should be cautious even when a caller seems to know who they are. A stranger knowing your name does not establish that the stranger represents a legitimate lender, financial institution, or other organization.
Blocking One Number Does Not Necessarily Block the Caller
The Massachusetts story exposes one of the fundamental limitations of traditional number blocking. Blocking a number is effective at preventing that specific number from calling again, but it does not necessarily identify or stop whoever was behind it.
If today’s unwanted loan call arrives from one number and tomorrow’s arrives from another, your phone may see two different callers. From the consumer’s perspective, however, the experience is the same. Another unwanted call has made it through.
This can turn spam blocking into a game of phone-number whack-a-mole. You block one, another appears, and apparently nobody told the mole that you’ve had enough.
Carrier spam filters help address this by looking beyond individual user block lists and analyzing broader calling behavior. Regulators are also putting increasing pressure on telecommunications providers to identify and stop illegal robocall traffic before it reaches consumers. Those protections are important, but no single system catches everything.
The Cost Is More Than Annoyance
Hundreds of unwanted calls and voicemails create another problem that deserves more attention: legitimate communications can become collateral damage.
When someone’s phone is constantly receiving suspicious calls, ignoring unfamiliar numbers becomes an understandable defense mechanism. Unfortunately, legitimate unfamiliar callers still exist. A doctor’s office, school, delivery driver, employer, contractor, local business, or financial institution may have a perfectly valid reason to call from a number that is not already saved in your contacts.
That creates a difficult choice. Consumers can answer every unfamiliar number and expose themselves to constant spam, or ignore unfamiliar numbers and risk missing something important. The Massachusetts consumer featured by Boston 25 demonstrates what happens when that balance begins to break down. Spam is no longer merely irritating when its volume causes people to distrust legitimate phone calls.
Caller ID Is Not Proof of Identity
Changing numbers is not the only challenge. Caller ID spoofing can allow a caller to manipulate the number displayed on a recipient’s phone, making a call appear more familiar or legitimate than it actually is.
The problem becomes even more complicated as artificial intelligence improves voice generation. As we recently covered in The Bunker Blog, modern AI-generated voices can reproduce increasingly convincing speech patterns and accents. A suspicious caller may therefore have several ways of creating familiarity, including what appears on your screen, what they know about you, and potentially even how they sound.
None of those signals alone should be treated as proof of identity. As the technology used to create convincing calls improves, consumers need stronger ways of determining whether an unfamiliar caller actually belongs on the other end of the line.
Recognition and Verification Are Different
Traditional call blocking largely depends on recognition. Is this number already known to be suspicious? Has the user blocked it before? Has the carrier identified a pattern associated with spam?
Verification approaches the problem differently by asking whether an unfamiliar caller can demonstrate that they should be allowed through. That distinction becomes particularly important when callers continually change numbers because a verification system does not necessarily need to recognize every bad number in existence before providing another layer of protection.
That still leaves a path for legitimate unknown callers. Instead of automatically rejecting everyone who is not in your contacts, verification gives legitimate callers an opportunity to get through while creating additional friction for unwanted callers.
Where CallBunker Fits
CallBunker was designed around this exact problem. Rather than relying entirely on identifying every suspicious phone number, CallBunker places a verification step between an unfamiliar caller and the protected user.
An unfamiliar caller can be required to complete the user’s selected verification process before the call is connected. Callers who successfully verify can get through, while callers who fail verification can be stopped before reaching the user’s personal line.
That distinction matters when unwanted callers can continually appear behind different numbers. Instead of forcing the consumer to recognize every new number, the burden shifts toward the unfamiliar caller proving that they should receive access.
CallBunker is not intended to replace carrier spam filtering, caller authentication, consumer reporting, or regulatory enforcement. Those protections all contribute to reducing unwanted calls. Verification adds another layer, particularly for the calls that make it past those defenses.
Massachusetts Is Seeing the Real Cost of Phone Spam
The Massachusetts loan-call story is a useful reminder that spam calls are not simply a minor inconvenience. When one consumer can accumulate hundreds of unwanted voicemails and receive repeated calls throughout the day, the problem begins changing how people use their phones.
Consumers become reluctant to answer. Legitimate unfamiliar callers become harder to distinguish from unwanted ones. Blocking numbers becomes increasingly frustrating when another number appears shortly afterward.
Patrick Crotty’s work at the National Consumer Law Center also shows why this remains an active consumer-protection issue. NCLC continues to advocate before regulators on unwanted and illegal calls and for protections designed to help consumers regain control over their phones.
That issue ultimately comes down to trust. The telephone still needs to work for people we know and for legitimate people we have never spoken with before. The challenge is keeping that door open without giving every unwanted caller unrestricted access. CallBunker’s approach is built around putting a verification checkpoint at that door.