Robocall relief
If you have gotten into the habit of refusing to answer your phone from unfamiliar numbers or you’ve grown weary of robotic messages warning you about a soon-toexpire extended car warranty, the Federal Communications Commission has some good news for you. Beginning last month, all the major cell phone providers in the United States were required to begin using technology designed to block those maddening robocalls.
For more than a decade, robocalls have been the top complaint at the FCC. That’s no surprise to most of us who have gotten used to a daily flood of unwelcome incoming calls, many of which are scams.
The problem has been getting worse in recent years. Through May of this year, American consumers had already been on the receiving end of slightly fewer than 22 billion such calls. That puts us on pace to get more than 52 billion robocalls this year.
Scammers are able to place these untraceable calls thanks mainly to technology that allows them to “spoof” legitimate phone numbers and make it appear as if they are calling from your own area code or town.
June 30 was the deadline for phone service providers to begin using STIR/Shaken technology that requires providers to verify where a call is coming from. Secure telephone identity revisited, or STIR, and signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens, or Shaken, allow calls to be tracked by a newly created robocall mitigation database.
That means companies will be able to track the source of the calls, making it easier to find and penalize robocall senders. Sending illegal, spoofed phone calls can lead to fines of up to $10,000 per violation.
It all sounds like great news for all of us who are fed up with intrusive robocalls, but unfortunately most experts believe this likely isn’t the end for robocalls. As technology to thwart these shady calls improves, so too does the scammers’ ability to circumvent those methods. Many have described the strategy for blocking unwanted calls to something like whack-amole.
That means the FCC and phone service providers must not stop at STIR/Shaken. They should commit to a long-term partnership to track robocaller methods and develop tactics to stop them.
And it also means that regulators and providers must also turn their attention to the unsolicited robotexts that are becoming more common. A text that interrupts your day with a spam message is as unwelcome as a call, even if you don’t have to hear that robotic voice.
These robo messages are more than a minor nuisance — they’re a serious intrusion that call for serious and sustained regulatory attention. The newly installed call-blocking technology gives cell phone users a long-awaited break, but the FCC and cell providers must not let up now.