FCC, Congress Join Forces to Combat Annoying Telemarketing Robocalls

A coalition of 51 state attorneys general and 12 wireless and hardline telephone carriers have teamed up to protect consumers from telemarketing robocalls.

The partnership was announced Aug. 22. The parties agree to track illegal robocalls to the source of the calls and begin providing phone customers with free call-blocking mechanisms.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald and Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge announced the partnership at a news conference in Washington, D.C., where the three are leading the effort to stop robocalls.

At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress have been working to eliminate illegal and unsolicited calls, as well. Many of the spam calls come from numbers that are masked to look like they originate locally, when the calls might actually be coming from another country housing the scammers.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai reported his agency voted in June to allow phone companies to block any robocalls that they feel customers won’t care to receive, whether the calls are illegal or not. The FCC also will take a more active role in controlling calls and spam texts that originate from outside the U.S.

In June, the House passed legislation providing harsher penalties for scammers who create literally billions of unsolicited calls to annoyed consumers every year. The House bill gave more muscle to the FCC to penalize illegal robocallers by assessing them $10,000 per violation instead of just $1,500 per violation.

Known as the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act, the law will ensure telephone companies use the newest technology to verify calls are genuinely originating where they appear. The phone companies will not be allowed to charge customers additional fees for this service.

Earlier this year, the Senate passed the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act, which includes similar legislation to stop telemarketing robocalls.

Number of Telemarketing Robocalls Have Increased

According to robocall blocking and tracking company YouMail, at least 29 billion robocalls were received in the first six months of 2019. Someone obviously answers and pays attention to some of the robocalls, though, because Truecaller, also a call blocking and tracking company, told Consumer Reports that people lost a staggering $10.5 billion to robocall scams in the year 2018 alone.

In one case, an 81-year-old woman lost $80,000 of her life savings after receiving just two scam robocall telemarketing calls from a man saying he was with the Social Security Administration. She said she believed him because he knew her name and other details about her Social Security information. The imposter said that her benefits would end unless she wired him funds that instant, so she did so.

Not long after, she received another call from a man who was in cahoots with the first imposter. This second man said he was with the FBI and that the first caller was a thief who couldn’t be trusted. The supposed FBI agent said he needed money to capture the first con man, so she sent him money, too.

According to the FTC, fewer people are falling for scams overall, but the ones who are victims of scams are suffering huge financial losses. Older people who are not able to make up losses of tens of thousands of dollars are most often the victims of scammers. Hopefully, the new laws and revitalized FCC will prevent such catastrophic losses.

Join a Free TCPA Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you were contacted on your cell phone by a company via an unsolicited text message (text spam) or prerecorded voice message (robocall), you may be eligible for compensation under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.