from the round-and-round-we-go dept
Every six months or so the FCC announces it has taken some major new step to thwart annoying robocalls. Yet Americans still receive more than 4.5 billion such calls every month, the vast majority of FCC fines are never collected, scammers elude meaningful accountability, and the problem persists.
Last week for example, the FCC announced it had levied a $300 million fine against what the agency calls “the largest illegal robocall operation the agency has ever investigated.” According to the FCC, the outfit made more than five billion car warranty scam calls to more than 500 million phone numbers during a three month span in 2021, violating federal spoofing laws in a bid to hide their identity:
“We take seriously our responsibility to protect consumers and the integrity of U.S.
communications networks from the onslaught of these types of pernicious calls,” said FCC
Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal. “I want to thank the Enforcement Bureau’s
Telecommunications Consumers Division for its groundbreaking work on this case, and we
will continue to work with our federal and state partners to hold these entities and others
engaged in similar conduct accountable.”
The problem, once again, is the scammers will likely never pay a dime. In part because actually collecting those fines falls to the DOJ, which historically either can’t track down the scammers in question, or can’t be bothered. One study found that the FCC and DOJ fined robocallers $208 million between 2015 and 2019, but only $6,790 was ever collected.
Beyond scammers being slippery there are numerous reasons robocalls never really die, and we’ve normalized losing control of our voice networks to dodgy actors.
For one, industry lobbyists have done a good job convincing regulators they should focus exclusively on “scam” calls, letting numerous legit companies and debt collectors harass consumers they know can’t pay — often by using the same tactics as scammers. Those same lobbyists have worked tirelessly to narrow FCC authority and craft broad loopholes in robocall protections that scammers can then exploit.
Groups like the National Consumer Law Center have issued reports noting how we’ve also been slow to thwart robocalls because many major wireless providers have profited from the scams. They’ve offered clear plans the FCC has yet to fully adopt, in part because the agency historically lacks the backbone to stand up to politically powerful telecom giants.
Activists and the FCC have argued for broader authority here, but our corrupt Congress has generally responded by doing the opposite and trimming FCC authority on most issues related to consumer protection (see: net neutrality, broadband privacy, media consolidation).
That’s not to say the FCC hasn’t occasionally made progress. They’ve finally managed to nudge a lagging industry into adopting anti-spoofing measures. And they have cracked down more intensely on the kind of dodgy telecom middlemen that help facilitate calls. But without greater authority and a sharper eye cast on “legit” robocallers (and their lobbying influence), the problem persists.
Filed Under: auto warranty scam, fcc, fines, robocall, scammers, telecom
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