Unwanted robocalls are currently the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission’s number one consumer complaint. While public officials and telecommunications providers are working to stop them, robocall scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous.
American consumers are now receiving nearly twice the amount of robocalls as they had two years ago. Last month, U.S. residents received over 4.4 billion robocalls, or 1,700 calls per second. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon; most notably, recent advances in VoIP technology which allow callers to make inexpensive and high-speed calls over the Internet.
Some robocalls are legal – political campaigns, non-profit organizations, and businesses commonly use automated calling to communicate with consumers – but many are not. According to Alex Quilici, chief executive officer of the robocall-blocking company YouMail, up to 40 percent of robocalls may be scams, with automated dialers posing as the IRS or other entities.
Adrian Abramovich, a Florida resident charged with delivering almost 100 million illegal robocalls in three months, is one of the most notable examples. In May 2018, the FCC fined Abramovich $120 million for robocall spoofing – the agency’s highest penalty for an individual ever – but yet, other actors persist in spoofing operations.
Even if a call recipient does not pick up the phone, scammers can still collect “dip fees” from caller ID databases. For every call, phone companies must pay approximately $0.0025 to $0.005 to caller ID databases, which then return a portion of the fees to the caller. On a small scale, “dip fees” are nominal in revenue, but robocallers can exploit the system through mass calling and therefore profit from millions of calls per day.
Several members of Congress co-sponsored legislation this year to require greater consumer protections for robocalls; most notably, the ROBOCOP Act and the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act. Although neither of these bills have yet passed their respective committees, a third, the RAY BAUM’s Act of 2018, was signed into law in March. The RAY BAUM’s Act was added to the Consolidated Appropriations Act, reauthorizing the FCC and directing the FCC and FTC to promote consumer awareness of robocalls and caller ID spoofing.
In 2015, the FCC attempted to control robocalls by preventing businesses from using ATDS to call mobile numbers – while broadly defining ATDS to include all devices with computing capability. As a result, the number of businesses subject to Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) litigation increased by up to 46 percent. Opponents of the 2015 omnibus order expressed concern that it prevented legal businesses from delivering information to customers. As Scott Delacourt of Wiley Rein testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, the regulation did not specifically target malicious behavior, but computing technology as a whole.
Consequently, the D.C. Circuit struck down the FCC’s 2015 definition of ATDS in ACA International v. FCC (2018). Following the court’s decision, the FCC asked for public comment to define ATDS under the TCPA, allowing businesses, consumer groups, and other stakeholders to provide input on the issue.
Building technology-based solutions
Defining ATDS was not the first time the FCC sought external input on a robocall-related issue. In August 2016, the FCC formed the Robocall Strike Force to bring telecommunications providers together to find technological solutions to prevent unwanted robocalls. The Robocall Strike Force identified spoofing as a major issue.
To prevent spoofing, the FCC adopted rules in November 2017 that authorized telecom providers to block calls that are likely to be fraudulent, such as calls coming from numbers that do not exist or are not assigned to anyone. Another method to potentially prevent spoofing is still in development: telecommunications companies are working on a new STIR and SHAKEN technology to help phone users verify incoming calls and decide whether or not to answer.
Even though telecom providers are building new systems to counter spam calls, robocalls are a challenging technological and regulatory issue because fraudulent actors are constantly evolving. Going forward, the point in question is how telecom providers can continue to adapt technologies to prevent spam calls – without mistakenly blocking legitimate callers – and how policymakers can best enable them to do so.
Photo by Jack Sem via cahttps://www.semtrio.com
Caitlin Chin was a senior online editor for the Georgetown Public Policy Review and a M.P.P. candidate at the McCourt School. She holds a bachelor's degree in government and Spanish from the University of Maryland.