How to Fight Against Spam and Robocalls

It’s a familiar cycle you probably go through several times a week, if not several times a day. Your phone rings with an unknown number displayed on the caller ID. “It’s probably a spam call,” you think. “I should just ignore it.”

But what if it’s not? It could be something important — your new client, your doctor, your child’s school. So you pick up against your better judgment, and nine times out of 10, it’s a recorded message informing you that you’ve won a luxury vacation package, you’re eligible for a great new insurance rate or you owe the IRS money. You hang up and block the number, but you know another dozen will crop up in its place. 

The Relentlessness of Robocalls

In 2019, Americans received 58.5 billion robocalls, a 22% increase from the previous year, according to data from call-blocking service YouMail. More than 38 billion robocalls have been placed so far in 2020, which amounts to around 116.3 calls per person.

Robocalls trying to sell you something are illegal, unless you have given your clear written permission to a company to call you about products or services. Unfortunately, many robocalls originate from outside the U.S., and it’s often difficult to track down the many different perpetrators. Spammers often use a tactic known as “neighborhood spoofing,” where they make their call look like it's coming from your own area code so you are more likely to answer.

Not all robocalls are illegal. Robocalls that don’t require your consent, under Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules, include messages that are purely informational — such as appointment reminders or flight updates — or those from political candidates, charities or some health care providers.

Receiving a barrage of robocalls every day is irritating at best and downright dangerous at worst. This year, bad actors have used robocalls to sow misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and keep people away from the polls on Election Day.

What Ever Happened to The National Do Not Call Registry?

The FTC created the National Do Not Call Registry in 2003 to keep consumers from receiving calls from telemarketers. The registry still allows certain types of calls, including those from political campaigns or charitable organizations, or related to debt collection or surveys. You can permanently enter your phone number in the registry, as well as report unwanted sales calls and robocalls, but it has become less effective over the years.

The Do Not Call Registry prevents sales calls from actual companies, but it can’t stop calls from scammers who ignore it. And if you’ve had a recent transaction with a company, or given them permission to contact you, they can still call unless you tell them to stop.

For example, if you recently bought a new car, you may have unwittingly opted in to receiving calls from the car’s streaming radio provider in that big stack of papers you signed — and they’ll call you for months afterward asking you to renew or upgrade your service. 

How To Prevent Unwanted Calls: Big Picture Action   

Spam calls may feel like a minor annoyance, but they are part of a much larger consumer privacy management problem. As citizens, how do we main and contain control over our privacy in a system that increasingly allows our personal data to be mined and monetized? It’s time to say “enough” and push representatives, governing agencies and companies to do more to protect us.

According to data from a 2019 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report, the number of consumer complaints about robocalls is increasing. In 2018, the FCC received 232,000 complaints about unwanted robocalls and telemarketing calls, a jump from 185,000 in 2017 and 150,000 in 2016.

In March 2020, the FCC adopted new rules that require phone companies to implement caller ID authentication by the end of June 2021 to combat robocall spoofing. With widespread use of the new technical standards, known as STIR/SHAKEN, illegal spoofing should become less effective, allowing phone providers to weed out spoofed caller ID information before calls reach subscribers, and law enforcement to identify spammers more easily.

I believe STIR/SHAKEN is a step in the right direction, but much more can still be done to protect consumers. The FCC only mandated these new rules after Congress passed the TRACED Act, bipartisan legislation aimed at cracking down on robocalls. Soon we will have a new presidency and a new Congress; now is an opportunity to demand that our representatives pass new legislation to reinvigorate consumer protections.

How To Prevent Unwanted Calls: Individual Action

Your best daily defense against spammers is call blocking. Here are some steps you can take:

In general:

•  Report unwanted calls on the National Do Not Call Registry.
• Don’t answer calls from unfamiliar or international numbers. Don’t return missed calls from unknown numbers. 
• If you do answer an illegal robocall, hang up without pressing any buttons.

On cell phones:

• Block spammers as they come in, one by one.
• Download a call-blocking app for your phone, such as Nomorobo, RoboKiller or Hiya.

On landlines:

• Check with your provider to see if it offers anti-spam software or can flag incoming spam calls.
• Buy a hardware call blocker if you have a copper line. Most are pre-programmed with a few thousand spam numbers and let you add new numbers.
•  If you have a VoIP landline, use an app like Nomorobo that enables a simultaneous ring function. Your phone will ring at your home and the company’s screening system to intercept spam calls. 

Fighting against spam calls can feel like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole. But with collective and individual action, we can start to root out offenders and get serious about privacy management.

This article originally appeared in Forbes on December 1, 2020.