"Press '1' now to speak with cardholder services, as we have an amazing timeshare opportunity reserved for you. It comes with a warranty extension for your current automobile and includes a month of free prescription refills!"

Such a pitch may not cover the complete range of possible robocalls—I get pitched regularly by some company that wants to wash my home's windows—but it does cover the slimy basics of this swampy industry. Which, by the way, is booming.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) data released last week (PDF) shows a massive 4.5 million consumer complaints about robocalls in 2017, way up from 2016's 3.4 million. For every single month of the year, robocalls topped the list of "Do Not Call" violations, and they came in six common forms:

Reducing your debt (credit cards, mortgage, student loans)

Dropped call or no message

Vacation & timeshares

Warranties & protection plans

Calls pretending to be government, businesses, or family and friends

Medical & prescriptions

Americans clearly don't want such calls. In addition to all the complaints, use of the "Do Not Call" registry has exploded since it was started in 2003. 10 million numbers were registered in the first four days after launch, and the registry now hosts 226 million active registrations.

After initially working well to deter unwanted calls, the problem has returned with a vengeance, thanks in part to super-cheap VoIP calling systems that make millions of foreign calls cost-effective (and unlikely to be halted by US law enforcement). These work in concert with digital calling systems that make it simple to automatically spoof caller ID numbers belonging to the victim's own area code. (I've personally seen plenty of these, so assuming that a "local" call is really local no longer works as a strategy to weed these out.)

And if you want to launch a targeted attack on an individual, it's not particularly hard to significantly disrupt their life with robocalls.

In response, the FTC has sponsored several "hackathons" with cash prizes that are aimed at producing better tech for identifying robocalls. Earlier this year, the agency also began releasing reported robocall phone numbers on a daily basis, which it hopes will help with these automated screening services. The FTC is also leaning on telecom companies to take a proactive approach to blocking, though this is tricky as telecoms don't want to incur liability for accidentally blocking legitimate communication.