I think I have had enough! Last night at dinner I received four (!) separate robocalls within a 45-minute period. I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. Unfortunately, these calls are on the rise. One report predicts that by next year, up to one-half of all calls to cell phones will be unwanted robocalls. According to the FCC, illegal and spoofed robocalls are its top consumer complaint and its top consumer protection priority. 

Just for clarification, a robocall is a phone call that uses a computerized auto-dialer to deliver a pre-recorded message, as if from a robot. Some robocalls may be unwanted but legitimate. For example, robocalls are often used for political and telemarketing phone campaigns and can also send out public-service or emergency announcements. Other robocalls use illegal spoofing and are clearly illegal. 

Illegal spoofing occurs when a caller maliciously falsifies the information transmitted to a consumer’s caller ID display. The FCC’s “Truth in Caller ID Act” prohibits anyone from transmitting misleading or inaccurate caller ID information with the intent to defraud, cause harm or wrongly obtain anything of value. 

The FCC has made several attempts to stop illegal robocalling with limited impact. Moreover, it is debatable whether these calls will ever completely be stopped since many originate from foreign countries. Nevertheless, the Commission is now seriously trying. In May it fined Adrian Abramovich $120 million for malicious spoofing as part of a massive robocalling operation aimed at selling timeshares and other travel packages. That caller ID spoofing operation made almost 100 million spoofed robocalls over a three-month period. 

On September 26, 2018, the agency followed that up by proposing two additional massive fines. First, it proposed a more than $37.5 million fine against Affordable Enterprises of Arizona for making millions of illegally-spoofed telemarketing calls that appeared to originate from consumers and other numbers not assigned to the company. 

The FCC also fined telemarketer Mr. Philip Roesel and his companies more than $82 million for illegal caller ID spoofing. Mr. Roesel made more than 21 million robocalls to market health insurance. According to the Commission,

Mr. Roesel, himself (doing business as Wilmington Insurance Quotes), or through his company, Best Insurance Contracts, Inc., made millions of spoofed robocalls. He sought to sell health insurance and generate leads for such sales. By spoofing his caller ID information, Mr. Roesel made it difficult for consumers to register complaints and for law enforcement entities to track and stop the illegal calls. Such conduct, along with long-standing Congressional and Commission recognition that illegal robocalls cause consumers significant harm, show intent to cause harm and an effort to wrongfully obtain something of value. (FCC September 26, 2018 News Release).

Mr. Roesel’s operation was dangerous, as it kept doctors in hospitals from receiving important pages:

In recent years, robocalls have been used increasingly by the health insurance industry to generate insurance leads and sales. In December 2016, Spōk, Inc. (Spōk), which provides paging services to medical providers, submitted an informal complaint to the Bureau about a significant robocalling event that was disrupting its emergency medical paging service. According to Spōk, the robocalling event adversely affected 5,000 to 10,000 of its service subscribers. The robocalling event harmed Spōk’s customers by disrupting those customers’ pager numbers, which are used by doctors, hospitals, and emergency first responders. Spōk said that one of its subscribers is Palmetto Health, which operates seven hospitals serving Columbia, Greenville, and Sumter, South Carolina. Palmetto Health is the largest health resource in the South Carolina Midlands region. According to Spōk, Palmetto Health experienced intermittent pager disruptions because of the massive influx of unauthorized robocalls to Spōk’s network. (In the Matter of Best Insurance Contracts, Inc., and Philip Roesel, dba Wilmington Insurance Quotes, Forfeiture Order, released September 26, 2018 at para. 4).

Although these individual actions by the FCC should discourage some of these robocall schemes, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel believes that a case-by-case approach is insufficient: 

If you think we’re drowning in robocalls now, get ready. The Washington Post just reported that by next year we will reach a new high-water mark. In 2019 nearly half of all cellphone calls will come from scammers.

This is insane. It’s great that this agency is issuing a forfeiture order and notice of apparent liability today. But it’s crazy to think that these individual actions are going to do the trick and staunch the flow. With this one-by-one effort we are trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. 

We need a better approach. We need to develop a policy statement to articulate this agency’s goals and efforts to reduce robocalls. We need to set deadlines. It has been roughly two years since this agency identified SHAKEN/STIR as a call authentication technology that can reduce robocalls. In the meantime, Canada went ahead and set a 2019 deadline to put his technology in place. We should be doing the same as our neighbors to the north. We should renew the Robocall Strike Force that this this agency convened a few years ago. We should have field hearings and seek technical expertise from far and wide. Closer to home, we should respond to every outstanding court remand on robocalls and petitions before this agency expeditiously.

Just this week, NBC news reported on the same statistic cited by the Washington Post. It sought comment from this agency. The best we had to offer was an unnamed official who said an “industry led effort is the fastest way” and we “hope some companies will implement it within the year.” I like hope. But hope alone is not going to fix this problem. It takes effort and it’s time for this to agency to offer real robocall resistance, because the flood of these calls is destroying something essential—trust in our communications network.

My dinner eagerly awaits the Commission’s next action.