Robocalls down, but scam texts soaring

I am happy to inform you that the federal government is revving up the war on robocalls.

I checked on how things were going just after hanging up on a tinny-voiced woman who wanted to warn me that my car’s extended warranty was going to expire unless I pressed 1.

Robocalls refer to anything that comes to your phone via automated dialing. Which might include legal stuff you want to hear about, like a snow day.

But we’re thinking only of the uninvited ones. Like “Chris from U.S. Autocare” who hung up when I asked how he got my name and number or the recorded voice of an alleged representative from Citibank who warned me about “suspicious activity” on my card that could be rectified only by pressing 1 right away.

Phone companies are now required to install cool new technology that enables them to stop these robocalls from getting through. Unfortunately, when U.S. Public Interest Research Group checked into the 49 largest such businesses, only 16 seemed to have completed the job as of mid-September.

And even more unfortunately, it looks as if the scammers are finding a new route that makes them even harder to avoid.

First — good news! Scam robocalls fell by about 11% from July to August, according to YouMail, a robocall-blocking company that tracks these things.

(Bad news! Thanks to the drop, we got only about 1.4 billion in August.)

One of the Federal Communications Commission’s big new weapons in the war against robocallers is known as STIR/ SHAKEN, further proof that everything in this world has a weird name.

STIR/SHAKEN aims to make it really hard for robocallers to use phony caller IDs. If you saw an ID on your phone announcing “scam risk” was on the line, I bet you wouldn’t answer it. But what if you just saw a phone number with your area code? Might be a telemarketing trickster. Or maybe something real you don’t want to miss.

The phony ID thing is known as spoofing. And anyone can do it. You can buy services that allow you to seem to be dialing from a different number. Teresa Murray of U.S. PIRG notes that it would also allow you to impersonate the IRS or Chase or Amazon or whatever.

Despite all the downside, regulations against robocalling in all its variations are pretty thorough, and the government is trying hard to make them work in real life.

But while scam robocalls dropped over the summer, scam texts were booming. Zooming.

Yes! Spam texts! RoboKiller, a filtering app, said the number of spam texts that will be sent in the United States could be as high as 86 billion in 2021. The Federal Trade Commission estimates Americans lost around $86 million to spam texts last year.

The FCC really needs to move robotexting to the top of its enforcement list, but that may not work until Congress gives it more authority.

Spam texts can be very short (“You Won!”), and there are no human voices to remind you that this message is really coming from a total stranger.

Just remember that the rules for dealing with them are pretty much the same as with a recorded message: Don’t respond — not even to suggestions that you simply let the texter know you want to be left alone. Don’t press anything. Really, ignore the sucker.

Just like those phone calls. The ideal response is always hanging up.