So they just don't stop
Why U.S. Robocall Hell Seemingly Never Ends
from the your-car-warranty-has-expired dept
"According to the YouMail Robocall Index, there were 3.6 billion U.S. robocalls placed last December, or 115 million robocalls placed every single day. That's 4.8 million calls placed every hour. Despite the periodic grumble, it's wholly bizarre that we've just come to accept the fact that essential communications platforms have been hijacked by conmen, salesmen, and debt collectors, and we're somehow incapable of doing anything about it.
it’s wild we’ve come to accept as a fact of life that neither the government nor the multibillion dollar telecoms it’s apparently beholden to can do anything at all to stop our super high-tech communications networks from being totally overrun by scams everyday, nonstop.
— Dell Cameron (@dellcam) January 11, 2022
Every 6-12 months or so the federal government comes out with a "new plan to finally tackle robocalls," yet the efforts only frequently make a small dent in the problem. One reason why is that each time the federal government unveils a new plan, it focuses exclusively on scammers. Said plan (and therefore the entire press coverage of said plan) discusses robocalls as if it's only something velour track suit clad dudes in Florida strip malls are engaging in.
Folks like Margot Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) has testified before Congress for years about how the biggest robocallers are often legitimate companies, usually selling you services you don't want, or harassing people they know can't pay overdue bills with sometimes hundreds of calls per day. The group notes that as of last month, scammers continued to make up the minority of overall robocalls:
The issue has long been that the marketing and financial industries doesn't want any of this to change, and their influence on Congress, regulators, and policymakers generally means that solutions carve out large loopholes in rules that weaken their effectiveness. And their influence on the courts has consistently eroded what agencies like the FCC can do about much of it. Last April, a Supreme Court ruling (Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid) effectively nullified the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's ban on autodialed calls and texts to cell phones without your consent.
So folks like Saunders keep pointing out while we have a patchwork array of rules that sometimes limit pre-recorded robocalls, the rules governing annoying spam texts or live robocalls are negligible at best:
"A lot of the live calls that are survey calls and debt collection calls to cell phones that are so annoying to people are made with automated dialers,” Saunders said. “There is at the moment no way of controlling those calls unless the called party individually blocks the caller." [...]
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