%$@#! Robocalls Must Be Stopped

Damn, damn, damn. Damn these telemarketers and robocallers straight to hell. I'm sick and tired of getting incessant calls from these predators. I am retired, so I am home during the day. All day … yes, I mean all day my phone rings with calls from these pesky firms seeking to sell me things like back braces, insurance, and auto warranties. I'm also bombarded by “friendly reminders” about how I need to save interest on my high-interest credit cards or how I must pay a non-existent bill.

Oh, yes … and people with voices and accents I can't even understand are telling me they are from software companies that have detected my computer has been compromised, or they tell me they represent the IRS or Social Security, and they need my money or my identify to repair an issue.

Sales calls, scams, spoofs, downright frauds – all of these calls are aggravations. Too much is too much. These people are trampling all over my right to privacy with their actions. Enough is enough! I love my landline. I pay dearly for it. Like Mick Jagger sings, “Hey, you, get off of my cloud!”

You better believe they are tricky with their craft. Robocall technology allows these marketers to target hundreds or even thousands of victims at one time. Now, “neighbor spoofing” even makes it look as if someone local or even someone you know is calling you instead of an out-of-town or toll-free area code showing up, which would make you less likely to answer the call. Shouldn't this be illegal? These clowns are trampling all over my right to privacy. The calls are beyond nuisances – they have made us victims of our own expensive services. In a recent article in Consumer Reports, one aggravated person complained ...

“Probably around 80 percent of the calls to my cell phone and landline are from bothersome idiots,” says Craig Steimling of Belleville, Illinois. “It’s gotten so that my 5-year-old grandson yells, ‘Junk call!’ every time the phone rings.”

Craig, I feel your pain. Transaction Network Services has estimated that one-third of all calls placed in the first half of 2018 were robocalls. Also, the FTC says it gets about 400,000 complaints about robocalls every single day. Autodialed spam and scam calls besiege our nation, interrupting our otherwise pleasant days and increasing our frustration.

Let me tell you some sad news – it's getting worse instead of getting better. In 2018, a record 48 billion robocalls were placed to phones in the U.S., according to YouMail, a company that blocks and tracks robocalls. That works out to 1,500 robocalls per second—which is 56.8 percent more robocalls than there were in 2017. Ring, ring, RING, RING – for God's sake, these calls make me cuss more than rapper Eminem in concert.

Robocallers stay a few steps ahead of telephone companies and government regulators working to thwart them. For example, the National Do Not Call Registry, established almost 16 years ago to stop legal telemarketers from calling people who didn’t want to be contacted, has failed to stop the many fraudsters who pay no attention to the list.

A bipartisan bill co-sponsored by John Thune, R-S.D., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., called the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act was introduced in Congress in January 2019. It would strengthen the existing Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 by making fines for intentional robocalling violations bigger and easier for the FCC to obtain.

Thune's bill was unanimously approved by the Senate Commerce Committee last April. That legislation, backed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, would push the major telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon to better authenticate calls so consumers know who they are coming from.

For now, legal calls include calls from political parties and candidates, calls from charities, autodialed telemarketing calls from legitimate people, and payment reminder calls.

Illegal calls include almost all autodialed or prerecorded calls to your cell phone – even those from charities and political parties – are illegal unless you have given express permission beforehand to be contacted this way or the call is for an emergency. Did you check a terms-of-service box or provide a phone number during a sign-up process? Doing either can constitute consent to be called, per FCC regulations.

(Octavio Blanco. “Mad About Robocalls?” Consumer Reports. April 02, 2019.)

Many illegal robocalls originate from overseas criminal rings and target the elderly and recent immigrants because both are deemed more receptive to come-ons. To help sort out the good calls from the bad ones, the FTC publishes a daily roster of blacklisted numbers – numbers that have received a significant volume of consumer complaints that apps may use to help update their list of numbers to block.

I long for simpler times when a landline was a benefit to communication, not an ever-ringing annoyance. I remember when businesses and corporations would employ the voice technology to call with a truer, more noble purpose in mind. I remember when there was actually another person on the line who seemed to care about the receiver and the call.

When did the control and the preferred employment of the business telephone change? Why did it change? I fear the answers are related to the same old evil that seeks to gain great advantage by constantly disrupting the lives of simple, contented people . Greed and the love of money keep our phones ringing with unwanted intrusions. Excuse my language once more, but it's time to put these sons-of-bitches back in their place and out of our lives.