You know the game by now: A call comes into your mobile phone. A number pops up on your screen. You dont recognize it. Your first instinct is to decline it, but what if its your childs school? The auto repair guy? Something else? Its a guessing game, and were the losers, again and again each day.
U.S. mobile phone users received 48 billion robocalls last year, and its getting worse. Companies, some of them overseas, are using auto-dialing programs that encode Caller ID information so that the call looks like its from a local number sometimes even numbers that look like your employer. Thats why were answering calls from computers and sending humans to voicemail. Were cussing at our phones instead of talking on them. Its annoying, and it violates laws that are supposed to protect Americans from spamming and scamming.
But there is, potentially, a flickering of relief to the robocall madness.
Lawmakers from state capitals to Washington are moving to slow the firehose of robocalls, and on Thursday, a U.S. Senate committee will hold a hearing on what it calls The Scourge of phone spam. Its a bit of a show hearing a chance for lawmakers to grill a telecom representative and signal that they understand their constituents misery. But the hearing is backed up with some legislation the TRACED Act which would push telecoms to improve their technology so that consumers can more easily identify scammers who wish to steal personal information. All four major carriers AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon have said theyll adopt the strategy, but critics think they need the 18-month deadline the TRACED Act would mandate.
The bill also makes it easier for the FCC to more quickly slap robocallers with significant fines, and it nudges the agency to be more aggressive with phone companies. The FCC has been ratcheting up its requests for telecoms to adopt more robust robocall technology, but it has been slow to actually require action.
Meanwhile, states are taking steps of their own, including Virginia, which passed a law cracking down on companies that call residents who are on the National Do Not Call Registry or have stated previously they dont want to be solicited by that company. Little, however, has been done recently in North Carolina beyond Attorney General Josh Stein joining 34 attorneys general in a letter urging the feds to do something about robocalls.
… Congress and the U.S. government should pursue newer and tougher action. It wont end the calls coming in to our mobile phones, but it could help us identify more quickly whos on the other end. …
