federal trade commission are up 50% this year. >> these calls are abusive and they're illegal. >> reporter: lois greisman is with the f.t.c. >> some of the calls, though, are fraudulently pitching goods. they're offering something that doesn't exist. >> reporter: what about the f.t.c.'s "do not call" list? that's not proving to be much of a deterrent for scammers. >> you can see here there's seven, eight, nine calls in the same second that came in that were blocked. >> reporter: which is where aaron foss comes in. >> we have antivirus on our computers. our servers are protected by firewalls. e-mail has spam filtering but we don't have anything protecting our voice calls. >> reporter: he developed nomorobo, software that detects high-frequency calling patterns, answers any robo-generated number calling, and hangs up before you have to deal with it. >> and that's going to make a test call. so now that's protected. >> reporter: no more robocalls come to this phone? >> will ring once on this phone