If your phone keeps buzzing with sales calls, prerecorded messages, fake delivery texts, or relentless follow-ups after you already said “stop,” you are far from alone. The problem is big, confusing, and often designed to wear people down.
In 2024 alone, consumers reported losing $470 million to scams that started with text messages, according to the Federal Trade Commission. And as of the end of fiscal year 2025, more than 258 million phone numbers were on the National Do Not Call Registry, while the FTC received more than 2.6 million Do Not Call complaints in FY 2025, much of it tied to robocalls rather than live telemarketing, according to the FTC’s 2026 report to Congress.
A lot of people wonder whether these calls are merely annoying, or whether they cross into something the law may treat differently. In general terms, the answer depends on who is calling, why they are calling, how they got your number, whether consent existed, and whether you revoked it.
In this post you’ll learn the answers to 10 common questions consumers ask when unwanted calls and texts keep coming. If you want a broader overview first, it may help to start with this plain-English overview of robocalls, scam calls, and Do Not Call protections.
<aside> 💡 Scroll to the bottom for every post in this series.
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No. Unwanted and illegal are not always the same thing.
Under federal law, some calls and texts may be lawful even if they are annoying. Others may violate rules tied to telemarketing, prerecorded messages, autodialed calls, caller consent, or Do Not Call restrictions. The details often matter.
For example, the FTC explains that recorded sales calls are illegal unless you gave the business written permission to robocall you, and if your number is on the National Do Not Call Registry, you generally are not supposed to get live or prerecorded sales calls from covered telemarketers either, as described in the FTC’s consumer guidance on unwanted calls and texts. The FCC also states that it enforces rules against illegal calls and texts and uses complaints to support enforcement and policy work, according to its unwanted calls complaint page.
That said, some categories are treated differently. Political calls, purely charitable calls, certain informational calls, and some debt-collection communications may not fit neatly into the same rules as sales calls. The FTC notes that the National Do Not Call Registry does not apply to all political calls or all nonprofit calls, though telemarketing on behalf of charities can still be covered in some contexts, as explained on the FTC’s Do Not Call Registry topic page.
Here’s what this often means in real life: a pattern of repeated sales texts after an opt-out may raise one set of issues, while collection texts, scam texts, or political calls may raise another.
Because the registry helps, but it does not stop everything.
The National Do Not Call Registry lets consumers tell many telemarketers not to call. It is a useful tool, but it does not block every category of caller, and scammers often ignore it altogether. The FTC says consumers have been able to opt out of most telemarketing calls since 2003, but the registry has limits and does not apply to every kind of caller or every bad actor, as explained by the FTC.
That is one reason people on the registry still hear from: