By next year, nearly half of the mobile phone calls we get will be scams, according to a new report from First Orion, a company that provides calls management and protection for T-Mobile, MetroPCs, Virgin Mobile and others.

The percentage of scam calls in US mobile traffic increased from 3.7 percent last year to 29.2 percent this year, and it's predicted to rise to 44.6 percent in 2019, First Orion said.

The most popular method scammers use to try to get people to pick up the phone is called "neighbourhood spoofing," where they disguise their numbers with a local prefix so people presume the calls are safe to pick up, First Onion said. Third-party call blocking apps may help protect consumers from known scam numbers, but they can't tell if a scammer hijacks someone's number and uses it for scam calls.

"Year after year, the scam call epidemic bombards consumers at record-breaking levels, surpassing the previous year and scammers increasingly invade our privacy at new extremes", First Orion CEO Charles Morgan said.

The problem is not just confined to the US.  In Italy, 90 percent of the calls I get on my mobile phone are from phone companies seeking to try and sell me different packages.  I usually hang up when I hear the automatic caller connected to a sales rep.

Howevere there is a marked reluctance on the part of politicians to stop companies making automatic sales calls to customers even if this makes mobile phones useless for the purposes they are designed for.