A New Senate Bill Would Hit Robocallers With Up To a $10,000 Fine For Every Call (gizmodo.com)

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey and South Dakota Republican Senator John Thune have introduced a bill on Friday that aims to ramp up the penalties on illegal robocalls and stop scammers from sending them. Gizmodo reports: The Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act, raises the penalty for robocalls from $1,500 per call to up to $10,000 per call, and allows the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to take action on illegal robocalls up to three years after the calls are placed, instead of a year. The Act also aims to push the FCC to work along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and other agencies to provide information to Congress about advancements in hindering robocall and prosecuting scammers. Perhaps most importantly for us highly annoyed Americans, the bill would also force phone service providers to use call authentication that filters out illegitimate calls before they go through to consumers.

Comments

And nothing will change

[Balial]

... wake me up when they charge the telcos for every robocall they don't filter. That will make a change.

Re:And nothing will change

[Anonymous Coward]

... wake me up when they charge the telcos for every robocall they don't filter. That will make a change.

Yes, and then they can charge the upstream provider.

Make them pay dearly for not putting in basic validation of sender at every stage and not doing any reasonable filtering.

Re: And nothing will change

[jpaine619]

Yeah.. Rid of the phone system... Because you don't use it, you don't think it's used.. You're wrong. There are still a shit ton of landlines still in use. Tens of millions in the USA alone.

Neat fact: If you're in a wireless only home, it's more likely you are poor. Statistically, higher income homes have a much larger chance of having a land-line versus homes below the poverty line.

As many as 150,000,000 Americans are still connected to the world via land-lines. (49.7% of the populace)

Yeah...... NO!

spoofed calls from abroad

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

These calls originate from outside America and the number is spoofed.

If FBI sets up honey pots, take the bait, follow up, go up the chain and fine the people who hire these robo callers, then it might have some effect. Otherwise you can even call for death penalty, it wont have any effect.

I smell bullshit

[rsilvergun]

Robocalls work because they do thousands of them. If you caught one of the guys $1500 per call is already going to be millions, if not billions and maybe trillions.

Also, we know damn well how to stop Robocalls, you stop them at the source by making AT&T et al police their bloody network. They don't do this because they're making money off the robocalls.

So once again, I smell bullshit. More political theater to distract me and you from real issues like healthcare, wages and those 8 bloomin' wars we're fighting....

Do I get a percentage?

[mveloso]

Shouldn't the end-user get a percentage of that fine? That would make me want to almost sign up, just until I could validate the caller. Then whack, I get $5k. That would be awesome.

Give the fine

[Anonymous Coward]

to the telco. Financial incentive to the telco would fix it. As it is, the telco profits from the extra biz.