The Federal Communications Commission’s crackdown on illegal robocalls has made little to no progress, according to testimony at recent U.S. Senate hearing. In the hearing, which took place on Oct. 24., it was highlighted that despite new regulations and rulings that the Commission has rolled out to stop these calls from reaching phones nationwide, the number of robocall cases still remain high, costing the nation billions of dollars annually.
In the United States, citizens received a total of 31 billion robocalls in the first half of 2023. Automated phone calls that aim to scam individuals and businesses into unveiling personal information or making purchases that result in an untended loss of thousands of dollars are predicted to cause a $90 billion loss in America by the end of this year.
The FCC, which regulates interstate and national communications, has vowed to clampdown on illegal robocalls for years. It has made efforts such as issuing fines against scam callers and recently rolling out “Operation Stop Scam Calls” in July, which partners with over 100 federal and state law enforcement agencies to cease telemarketing schemes.
Despite years worth of efforts from the FCC, testimony from clients of the National Consumer Law Center and the Consumer Federation of America in the Senate hearing reveals that the Commission has failed to protect Americans from these calls.
“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission) has been trying to address the problems, but, to date, its methods have not succeeded in achieving a meaningful reduction in these unwanted and illegal calls. Either the FCC does not have sufficient legal tools to stop these unwanted and illegal calls, or it has not yet determined how to deploy those tools effectively,” said Margot Saunders, senior counsel, National Consumer Law Center.
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Before an illegal robocall hits the phones of consumers, it first has to go through gateway and intermediate voice service providers which have the power to accept and transmit calls to be passed further down the call path, with profit being a factor in the decision-making process. The National Consumer Law Center believes that in order to further protect consumers from these unwanted calls, consequences for voice service providers who fail to tackle these calls should be severe.
“The choices that providers in the call path make about whether to accept calls from upstream providers should be guided not only by the price paid for those calls, but also by the risk involved in accepting calls from those upstream providers. The consequences of the wrong choice should be steep,” said Saunders.
The National Consumer Law Center also believes that the FCC should “suspend complicit voice service providers after one notice, preventing them from transmitting illegal calls.”
The Senate hearing also explored the possibility of using artificial intelligence to help crack down on scam calls reaching consumers. Senators flagged that phone providers, who are required to submit certifications to the FCC’s Robocall Mitigation Database that display their efforts to tackle illegal robocalls on their networks, have submitted blank or incomplete documents to the RMD database to avoid taking accountability for robocalls.
“That’s a great place where you could apply that [AI] technology and probably discard half the entries in the database in an afternoon or a week of work,” said Michael Rudolph, chief technology officer of YouMail.
