And about time, too, since the Feds are hopeless.
State attorneys general take aim at robocalls: 'Bad actors' days 'will soon be numbered'
“Robocalls are a scourge — at best, annoying, at worst, scamming people out of their hard-earned money,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, said in a statement. “By signing on to these principles, industry leaders are taking new steps to keep your phone from ringing with an unwanted call. They’ve also agreed to do more to help other state attorneys general and me track down the scammers and fraudsters responsible so that we can keep them from preying on people."In conjunction with a dozen phone companies, attorneys general from all 50 states and Washington D.C. [emphasis added] announced on Thursday new provisions to combat the issue.
Stein stepped up to organize this coalition of state AGs and phone companies to deploy several technologies, and increase law enforcement activities.
Attorneys general, phone companies adopt eight principles to fight robocalls
- Implementing call-blocking technology at the network level.
- Offering free, simple call-blocking and labeling tools.
- Implementing technology that verifies the sources of phone calls.
- Monitoring phone networks for robocalls.
- Verifying phone customers.
- Identifying and investigating robocall sources.
- Working with law enforcement to trace robocalls.
- Requiring phone companies to cooperate in call traces.
One bit I particularly like is that for those calls that get through the filters, they promise to give you the real phone number of the source, not a spoofed number.
They think that they can recognize spam phone calls without hearing any content. Filtering e-mail spam by processing the text is simpler.
The FTC has national responsibility for this work with its DoNotCall list, but has been Missing in Action on enforcement for many years. It did improve regulation of spam phone calls recently, allowing phone companies to proactively block known spammers.
According Seattle-based software company Hiya, Americans received a total of 26.3 billion robocalls in 2018, a 46 percent increase from 18 billion in 2017.
I have the Hiya app on my Android phone. It can block numbers when I tell it to, but it cannot block spammers who change phone numbers for every call, like the egregious "Michael with the Medicare Assistance Program".
I sometimes get tired of reporting these ganefs, but when we start to see prosecutions, we can call on the entire phone-using population to join in stomping on them, the way business stomped on junk fax, even in the face of Republicans enabling it.
In 2005, the Junk Fax Prevention Act [sic] amended the TCPA to permit the sending of unsolicited facsimile advertisements to individuals and businesses with which the sender has an established business relationship (EBR) and to provide a process by which any sender must cease sending such advertisements upon the request of the recipient.
When you get a junk fax, you can fax back a bill for the violation. You can take that bill to Small Claims Court.
Republicans claim that enforcing such laws is not cost-effective, because the damages and fines that can be collected are much less than the cost of the legal action. (First-order thinking) But if you prosecute all of them, they stop. (Second order thinking, the effects of the effects.) That is worth more than money.
Note: This Diary started as a comment in a Good News Diary.
Well, I see that I will have to Diary this, after I get tomorrow's Renewable Friday post queued. I was in the fight against e-mail spam in the 1990s, when Republicans legalized it while pretending to do the opposite in the (Yes, you) CAN-SPAM Act.