Lots of cell phone spamming after a trip to the US from Canada. Is this to be expected?

Question

This is related to usa - Should I use a "burner" phone when visiting the US? - Travel Stack Exchange but not for border control reasons.

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I did a road trip through the USA, from Canada, for 5 days.

During that trip I:

• signed up for data roaming with my Canadian cellular provider. The roaming was done on a large US cellular provider (one whose news coverage is usually rather unflattering). Therefore they knew my number.

• only gave out my phone number twice to hotels, in response to "where can we contact you?" questions. I usually purposefully switch the last 2 digits of my phone number to avoid spamming (e.g. 37 rather than 73) but figured I wanted to be notified if I forgot something.

Upon my return, I have easily 10-20x the usual number of spam robocalls. I have an unlisted number and only give it out when needed so I usually don't get bothered much. These spam calls are from numbers not in my contacts, don't leave any messages, not easily found on reverse lookups. From different cities in British Columbia, where I don't know anyone, but also from other provinces.

I usually have 3-4 of those a month, at most. First day I was back in Canada, I had 7 or 8 and have been getting a few a day since. Not a huge hassle, the phone is set up to send unrecognized numbers straight to voice mail, without ringing.

Is this something that can be expected from only giving out your number twice and being signed up for roaming? I assume that one of the hotels or the cellular company passed on my number to marketing third parties.

I am not expecting a definitive answer, but, well, if other travelers have had the same experience we can all learn to be more careful when traveling in the US. And if it didn't happen to anyone else, I'll chalk it up to a coincidence.

P.S. I assume this would be more likely to happen to Canadians as I can't see the attraction for US companies to enter into lots of marketing list arrangements with random European or Asian countries.

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Update 10 weeks later. The unknown caller calls only ended up lasting for about 2 weeks after my return and their volume has now dropped back to its very infrequent average so this does seem related to my trip and not some otherwise changed circumstances. If I had to guess, my number was sold on to a few shady operators who learned not to bother after getting ignored from different spoofed numbers.

Answer 1

I assume that one of the hotels or the cellular company passed on my number to marketing third parties.

This.

In the US, there's very little protection for personal information and it is being traded by everyone and everywhere. If you gave your information to a US merchant, they'll sell it. In some States you can restrict who they can share it with, but you'd need to proactively do that and they'd tell you "we'll stop sharing it within 30 days", which is essentially meaningless. In California you can demand to delete your personal information, under certain conditions, but not in other States. Which is also meaningless in this case since they already have sold it.

p.s. I assume this would be more likely to happen to Canadians as I can't see the attraction for US companies to enter into lots of marketing list arrangements with random European or Asian countries.

It is as likely to happen to Canadians as to anyone else. But with regard to robocalls, because of the numbering system and costs, it is likely that Canadians would be affected much more than anyone else.

Answer 2

Lots of cell phone spamming after a trip to the US from Canada. Is this to be expected?

It's not exactly what you're looking for but I live in the US and have given out my number to 100+ vendors over my time here. I've checked my voicemail records and I estimate I get around 1 robocall a month (I set my phone to send all unknown numbers straight to voicemail). It used to be more frequent a few years ago but these days it's no longer a significant nuisance.

That being said, my number is registered on DoNotCall.gov, which probably helps reduce the amount of spam. They don't accept Canadian numbers unfortunately, so if you're already registered with the Canadian equivalent there's not much you can do.