‘Press 1’ for some relief from those annoying robocalls

These days, when my cellphone or landline rings, I’m never surprised that it’s a robocall.

Even with being on a do-not-call list and having a call-screening application on my mobile phone, day in and day out, I’m bombarded by the “Hi, this is Tom” health-care guy, some lucky news about a vacation resort or “Rachel, from card services.”

So I was happy to learn that this past week, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing titled “Abusive Robocalls and How We Can Stop Them.”

The committee heard from Adrian Abramovich, the former president of Marketing Strategy Leaders, a Miami company. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission proposed fining Abramovich $120 million for engaging in what was believed to be the largest spoofed robocall campaign ever shut down by regulators.

Spoofing is how robocallers thwart the caller ID function on your phone. Rather than displaying the actual location and company behind the sales call, a spoofed call displays a familiar-looking number in your own area code and with the same prefix as your phone number.

This “neighbor spoofing” leads you to believe you are about to pick up a genuine call from a friend or neighbor. Another spoofing technique is to display the ID of a trusted company that has nothing to do with the call.

The FCC reported that in one three-month period in 2016, Abramovich’s company made 96.7 million phone calls that appeared to be affiliated with TripAdvisor. But his company was actually working for Mexican-based call centers that were selling timeshares and vacation packages in that country.

The FCC went after the Florida company following a complaint that its robocalls were affecting the paging services for hospitals, emergency rooms and doctors. The emergency communications transmitted through the paging service was being bombarded by crippling robocalls.

“Service outages, slowdowns, or other problems caused by robocalls flooding a paging network constitute a serious risk to public safety because they interfere with critical hospital and emer-

gency room communications,” the FCC wrote.

TripAdvisor also complained that it was wrongfully being linked to these Mexican vacation offers.

The way the Miami company’s robocall operation worked, the callers who answered the phone displaying a spoofed local number got a vacation offer instead. Those callers who then pressed

“1” for more details were diverted to one of the hotels that was paying Abramovich’s company.

Abramovich told senators that he is contesting the fine and that what he did was an acceptable telemarketing practice.

“Clearly, regulation needs to address the carriers and providers and require the major carriers to detect robocalls activity,” Abramovich said in testimony submitted to the Senate committee.

Abramovich told senators that he’s far from being a robocall “kingpin.” He’s probably right, considering that YouMail’s Robocall Index has logged about 2.4 billion robocalls a month.

“Unwanted robocalls are universally hated,” FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn wrote in justifying the fine against Abramovich, which was the biggest in FCC history. “Too often, they disrupt some of our most precious, and increasingly rare moments of peace and quiet.”

Robocalls are so annoying that companies such as the Jolly Roger Telephone Co. sell monthly subscriptions to its service, which answers your robocall with a robocall of its own that ties up the telemarketer for minutes without making the sale.

Or you can do it on your own. I read about one technique that involves professing interest in the offer, and then once connected to a live sales person on the other end, just pretend to have a chronic coughing fit that keeps you from giving the needed information.

“Yes, that sounds good. Would you like my (cough, cough) credit (cough, cough) card? Great, here’s the number (cough, cough, cough, cough) two (cough, cough) five. What’s that? (cough, cough). You didn’t (cough, cough) get it? Excuse me, I need to blow my nose. I’ll be back in a minute . ... That’s better. Where were we? (cough, cough)”