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Which? reports robocall and nuisance call complaints have surged since May, with spoofed caller IDs making victims more likely to answer.
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Which?Scam phone calls are copying the caller ID of banks, delivery firms and energy suppliers to get people to answer and hand over card details or one-time passcodes. Which? reports that complaints about these calls have hit a five-year high. If your phone shows your bank's name or number, hang up anyway and call the bank back on the number printed on your card.
The call works by borrowing trust that belongs to someone else. Scammers spoof the caller ID so the screen shows a bank, a delivery firm or an energy supplier instead of the real number behind the call. That single detail decides whether the phone gets answered at all, and Which? found it works: people who had money stolen were far more likely to pick up because the display looked genuine.
Once the call connects, the script changes depending on the target. Fraud networks use the call to harvest card details and one-time passcodes, the codes that unlock bank accounts. Other callers push overpriced home-appliance warranty cover, a tactic Which? has tracked since 2018, often aimed at elderly relatives pressured into spending thousands of pounds on policies with no real use. Energy and smart meter calls, telecoms pitches and bogus delivery messages fill out the rest of the volume.
The numbers show how fast this has moved. The Information Commissioner's Office recorded a rise in robocall complaints from 1,374 in July to 3,684 in September, the highest level since 2021, and nuisance calls to mobiles rose from 1,923 in May 2026 to 5,202 in October, an increase of more than 170%. Landline calls stayed broadly flat over the same period, which means the shift toward mobiles is where the real growth sits. Data from trueCall shows more than one in three incoming landline calls, 84,694 out of 247,982, were flagged as nuisance or suspicious in September 2026 alone.
The money lost shows where the real damage lands. Through the Which? scam sharer tool, more than 1,400 fraudulent calls were logged in the year to September 2026, with victims reporting a combined total of more than £241,000 stolen. Cryptocurrency schemes, fake product offers and bogus fraud recovery services took the largest amounts. The spoofed caller ID is the single step the whole approach depends on: remove it, and the rest of the script has nothing to stand on.
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