How To Get Rid Of Robocalls
On April 3, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it was undertaking a “Spring Cleaning” initiative to take action against certain robocall scams. The first one was an order threatening action against a company promoting a National Tax Relief program that doesn’t exist.
That’s all well and good, but it’s not nearly enough to put a dent in an industry that’s bombarding consumers with millions of calls that were first declared by Congress in 1991 to be illegal. In fact, nothing the Commission has done over the years has stopped the flood of annoying calls.
The years-long effort by the government to rid consumers of the infuriating curse of robocalls has failed. It’s time for a new approach, one that doesn’t dance around the edges but gets to the heart of the problem.
For example, the FCC in February, determined that robocalls generated with the help of AI were even more illegal than they were previously.
The FCC as the primary enforcer has issued millions of dollars in fines and issued dozens of “cease and desist” letters to companies found to have been making robocalls.
Last summer, the combined authorities of the Department of Justice, the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a crackdown on robocalls. State attorneys general and other Federal agencies also joined in the new effort.
All of this, and more, is for something that Congress made illegal in 1991. Back then, in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Congress said: “The purposes of the bill are to protect the privacy interests of residential telephone subscribers by placing restrictions on unsolicited, automated telephone calls to the home and to facilitate interstate commerce by restricting certain uses of facsimile (tax) machines and automatic dialers.”
As the law noted, “Unrestricted telemarketing, however, can be an intrusive invasion of privacy” and that “Many consumers are outraged over the proliferation of intrusive, nuisance calls to their homes from telemarketers.”
Congress acted again, in 2019, with the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrent Act (TRACED) that mandated new technological standards to authenticate calls and provided for harsher penalties.
The FTC is also on the case, hosting the Do Not Call Registry among its anti-robocall efforts. There are about 249 million people on the Registry.
With all of that legislative and regulatory firepower, one might think that robocallers would be on the run. Not so. Let’s take a look at the depressing numbers of a valiant but futile, campaign that has been running for more than 30 years even as the FCC proclaims on its website that stopping robocalls is “a top priority” and features a page of enforcement actions.
According to industry estimates cited by the FCC, consumers receive 4 billion (yes, with a “b”) robocalls every month, about 50 billion per year. According to one industry estimate, robocalls in December 2022 “averaged 137.6 million calls/day and 1,831 calls/second, compared to November which averaged 158.2 million calls/day and 1,593 calls/second.” That’s a lot of calls in the face of two Federal laws, all those enforcement actions and many actions at the state level.
When the 1991 bill was passed, the FCC received about 2,300 complaints in a year, according to the Senate Commerce Committee report on the bill. The FTC received “a substantial number of complaints” as well. Today, the situation has changed. The FCC reports an average of more than 223,600 complaints per year for the years 2018–2023. Similarly, the FTC reported that in FY 2023, the agency received a mere 1.2 million complaints about robocalls, down from 1.8 million in 2022.
It almost seems as if it’s time to declare “Resistance is futile.” If massive fines and cease-and-desist letters, etc. won’t stop the robocallers, what will? Here’s a suggestion that’s a little out of the standard enforcement box: cut off their oxygen. As living things need air to breathe, robocallers need telephone numbers. Every call needs a connection to the larger telephone network, whether wired or wireless. Cut off access of robocallers to telephone numbers.
Telephone numbers in the U.S. are assigned according to the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) resulting in the familiar 10-digit code, (XXX)-XXX-XXXX. The North American Numbering Plan Administrator (NANPA) is the warehouse for phone numbers. Communications companies don’t even have to pay for the numbers. Phone numbers are considered to be “a public resource.”
The chain continues when robocallers need more telephone numbers. They go to their carriers and ask for whatever amount of numbers they need for their business. The telemarketers then use those numbers to bombard consumers with calls. Working backwards, regulators should be able to find who is using the numbers and trace them to the bad actors.
Instead of using the traditional punishments, the FCC should ban the robocalling companies and the people who run them from getting phone numbers. Without a network connection, the companies can’t do business.
The FCC could ask the carriers, like Verizon or Frontier, to stop assigning numbers to robocallers, but asking never works. There is no incentive for the phone companies to cut off customers because they get paid regardless of the use to which the line is put. They will have to be forced to do so, knowing in advance that telephone companies always say “no” to anything regulators want them to do.
There are lots of ways the bans could be structured. My recommendation: Forget three strikes. This isn’t baseball. Robocallers should get one. How long a ban should last is another detail. I vote for forever. Let’s make sure that the “public resource” is put to good use, not to harassing consumers.
