It's happening right now - all across America. People just sit down to dinner, watching TV and the phone rings. It's a robocall - telemarketer, or worse - a fraud.

Phone scams cost Americans $350 million a year. It's hard to come up with something more irritating than robocall - computer generated calls that always come at the wrong time. They are calling to sell people something.

During the first 4 months of this year, the us phones got somewhere around 10 billion robocalls - a record pace, this explains why the complaints in the Federal trade Commission increased by 50 percent this year.

"These calls are offensive and they are illegal," said Lois Greisman with the FTC. "Some of the calls, the scammers who offer something that does not exist."

"We have antivirus on our computers, our servers are protected by firewalls," said FOSS. "And e-mail has spam filtering, but we can't protect our voice calls." The company has developed "Nomorobo" is software that detects high frequency calling patterns, and answers any generated Robo caller, and hangs up before people will pay attention to the call. App Nomorobo goes for about $5 per month.
sections: World News, Hi-Tech