Texas hopes to pull the plug on robocalls after uptick

Residents of Texas’ largest cities saw a 30 percent uptick in robocalls this year, a trend Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hopes to reverse by joining a bipartisan group of 40 state attorneys general working to reduce such solicitations.

That’s up from the more than 1 billion pesky — and often illegal — robocalls Houstonians received in 2017, according to data from YouMail, an app designed to block robocalls. The average Houston consumer is receiving about a dozen robocalls a month, according to the statistics.

The increases continue despite the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits telemarketers from calling cellphones using automatic telephone dialing systems or prerecorded messages without express written consent. Promises of low interest rates on loans, student loan forgiveness and health insurance enrollment are the three most frequent types of calls, said Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail.

Scam calls are the most challenging to regulate, he said, because the technology evolves much faster than the law. Many of the calls come from overseas, making them almost impossible to trace.

“The problem is it’s so easy to make them. There’s actually websites you can go to where you can put in a list of phone numbers, you can upload an audio file, you can put in a phone number so when people press one it goes to that phone number,” Quilici said. “You can do all this in 10 minutes. Put a couple hundred dollars on a prepaid debit card, and I can annoy all of Houston. When it’s that easy to do, people do it.”

In November, the Federal Communications Commission changed its rules to allow phone companies to proactively block fraudulent calls. Quilici said giving the phone companies more power to trace robocalls could be an important step in lessening the robocalling problem.

The state attorneys general are collaborating with major telecommunication companies to find other solutions to the robocalling problem, according to a news release.

Some fear it will impossible to stop robocalls completely.

“Email spam hasn’t gone away and people have been working on that for 20 years,” Quilici said. “It’s just quietly gone to a different folder, and every once in a while, you get something that’s annoying.”