Interesting that everyone's finding the spam calls are going up across the board. It's just strange b/c before the switch, I got them rarely if ever. Starting the same day the number transferred, they immediately went up to multiple each day.
There's a reason for that in Republic's case... or at least there is for their proprietary hacky hybrid Sprint/VoIP services (and not their current T-Mobile based offerings as far as I know - unless they're
still doing that for some incomprehensible reason, though I doubt it given all of those associated problems have gone away after the T-Mobile shift).
The older Sprint/VoIP Republic hybrid actually has two phone numbers associated with the account. Your primary Republic service is not actually mobile phone service in this situation, it's VoIP service - which is why you can do "WiFi only" plans. Because of this, you now have two numbers if you're paying for their "mobile" plan: The number you ported in which is now on a VoIP server, and the
actual mobile number attached to the smartphone that your "primary" VoIP number gets forwarded to when their VoIP app doesn't have WiFi access to connect to the server.
There aren't many "new" or "virgin" phone numbers left in the United States, and the phone numbers used can have a hard life that's compounded by our society's continued higher demand for recirculating those numbers, thus leaving them out of circulation to try and "clean" that history for shorter and shorter periods. This winds up with a lot of used numbers that have inherited a lot of "baggage" from previous customers...
...but back to Republic. If you bought a proprietary used handset of theirs, this is why the spam load has increased. You've been assigned a
second phone number that you're not supposed to know about specifically so your "WiFi first" VoIP service can still be used with a mobile phone and you can receive calls. And to make matters worse, they technically reclassify your primary number after the port to VoIP as a "land line" or "non-mobile number" if you will, which now requires additional optional registration to the Federal Do Not Call List instead of having it classified as a "mobile number" by default, which is legally supposed to be wholly off limit to marketers.
This said, yes, spam calls are ever increasing the past few months on mobile numbers across the board. I've experience it myself, and seen and heard similar complaints from friends and family. I can't help but wonder given the timing if that increase is corollary to the fact that the FCC and FTC both are being defanged under the new administration combined with a new legislature that's actually wanting to redefine the very concept of telephone marketing to the point of meaninglessness. Corollary is not causation, of course, but the timing with the corresponding headlines does raise an eyebrow or two.
...or it could have just been a coincidence.