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

[Xenx]

A lot of telcos offer services to block specific callers and such. Blocking robocalls is doable, but requires a bit more finesse. The telcos don't want the liability when the filter blocks a call that the recipient really wanted to receive. Even if they weren't legally liable for it, they still don't want to fight with a paying customer when it happens. It's safer, from a business standpoint, to not filter.

Re: And nothing will change

[saloomy]

Really, we should just get rid of the telephone system. Put it on open protocols for audio/video/data, run it over the internet. End to end encrypted. That old shit has got to go. Plus, I don't want to pay for a phone plan when an iPhone and a data plan will do.

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!

Re:And nothing will change

[mark-t]

When they start charging the telco's for every robocall they don't filter, it's a near-certainty that this cost will just be passed on to all subscribers, and rates will simply go up.

So no.... that's not a solution.

Re: And nothing will change

[thomst]

An Anonymous Coward predicted:

and they'll have an exemption for political calls...

Yes, they will.

"They" will, because of the First Amendment's free speech guarantee. It is a long-established principle in American jurisprudence that political speech is granted extraordinary protections. Robocalls on behalf of candidates for elected office fall into that category, and will thus receive exemption from any strictures placed on commercial robocallers. By legal precedent, commercial speech is granted the lowest level of protection from government censorship under First Amendment principles, whereas political speech in general - including artwork that expresses a political viewpoint or social commentary, as well as campaign robocalls - enjoys the highest level of protection.

Note that courts have long held that First Amendment prohibitions on government censorship extends to government bodies, and elected and appointed officials at all levels of goverment from the Federal to the hyper-local. A village council has no more right to prohibit protected forms of speech than does Congress. On the other hand, it has also been firmly established by the courts that governments are under no obligation to provide a platform for political speech, unless they are compelled to do so by state or local law. Thus, as a relevant example, in California, city councils are required to provide a period for public comment at their meetings, but they are permitted to limit the length of time any individual speaker is alotted. Most therefore have rules limiting comments by uninvited speakers - which is to say, "the general public" - to 3 minutes. (That limit is not universally enforced - but, when it is, it must apply equally to everyone who chooses to speak during the public comment period.)

Railing at politicians for carving out exemptions from robocalling for themselves indicates a lack of understanding of the effect of the First Amendment on the ability of legislators to restrict political speech. They can and will specifically exempt calls of a political nature from robocalling - but, if they did not do so, rest assured that the first pol that's cited for violating the shiny, new restrictions they try to emplace will promptly sue them for violating his or her right to free speech.

He (or she) will, without question, win that lawsuit - and the judge who hears the case might well rule the entire law to be unconstitutional, and unenforceable ...

Re:And nothing will change

[Carewolf]

When they start charging the telco's for every robocall they don't filter, it's a near-certainty that this cost will just be passed on to all subscribers, and rates will simply go up.

So no.... that's not a solution.

That is now how business work.. They are already charging as much as they can get away with, if they could get away with raising prices,, THEY WOULD ALREADY HAVE DONE SO!

Re:And nothing will change

[MrMr]

What I find especially strange about the discussion how this will not work is that in many places it just works. Where I live, robocalling can easily be non-existant if you don't want it, simply because a party that contacts your phone is fined and if the telco cannot identify that party they carry the fine.
There is a legally binding preemptive register for cold callers, and a formal right to refuse to be contacted by parties you have corresponded with in the past. I've seen it work when two years ago I a bought a spare sim-card, and forgot to block that number. It saw about five attempts in a couple of days (obviously junk as I never actually used the number) before I blocked it. No more garbage calls since then.

Re:And nothing will change

[Spamalope]

The robo calls I'm getting forge the caller ID to show a random local exchange number. The telco has info - they wouldn't let anyone make a call without knowing who to bill but you have to pay for an 800 number or the like to get actual, real 'caller ID info' - unless the telcos have made that not be complete to add another layer of 'pay more and this time you'll get caller info Charlie Brown! - Lucy'.

Telcos need to filter call origin info vs data in the call info.

Getting a true identity of the offender is a problem. The group getting the financial benefit is the one we want to find, as they're funding the problem and they have the money to pay the fine. The FCC needs the power to setup tracked payment cards for this purpose. So if as in my case a medical provider sold my medical records to a medical device robocall spammer, I can record the call and make a purchase with the flagged card. The purchase auto-flags the account at the credit card issuing bank level and places a freeze on the vendors account if it's in a cooperating country, or blocks it from the US banking system if not.

Re: And nothing will change

[jpaine619]

I'll applaud your logic, but I don't think this is the case. 97% of American's have internet. So, that's nearly everyone. Cable dominates the internet market by a HUGE margin. DSL is a large percentage, but, according to my rough calcs using online data, all of the DSL in the entire country is only equal to the single largest cable internet company's customer base.

The reason for the "affluence" factor seems to be that while nearly everyone has a cell phone, it's the affluent who have both. i.e. if you're poor, you're gonna have a cell, but you aren't also shelling out for a land-line.

For the most part, landlines are very reliable. Cellular.. not so much.. I'm not saying cellular isn't reliable, just that landlines are... more reliable. Landlines are self powered; the system itself and the end devices.. Most folks I know, who have a landline, have a cordless phone in addition to at least one (and usually only one) old style self-powered handset.

Where I'm at, the rule of thumb is: If you have kids, you have a landline. The last thing you need in an emergency is a phone with a dead battery. Kids are accident magnets..

Finally, landlines work where cellular doesn't. So if you live in a non-cell area, you have a landline.. But, the odds are that you work in a cell area, so you keep a cell in your pocket..

Re: And nothing will change

[currently_awake]

A landline phone still works in a disaster. The government sets actual legal requirements for that stuff, where a cellphone it's whatever the company feels like providing. A hurricane goes through your neighbourhood, you want a phone that still works.

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.

YES YES YES YES Hallelujah, we shall overcome

[goombah99]

This is going to change things if it happens here's why:

Bounty hunters. If it's really 10K$ per call, I can offer to split my share with a bounty hunter who will track down the Mofo and collect.

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.

reverse charge

[hdyoung]

Reverse charging is probably the ONLY thing that will prevent this. Want to call me? You need a validated credit card that deposits a tenth of a penny into my account. If this service was available, I would sign up for it in an instant. Robocalls would drop to very nearly zero and they would stay there.

Re:Fix caller ID

[RhettLivingston]

Caller ID "spoofing" is a major feature that many people often use. For example, Google Home uses it when you set it up to utilize your cell's number when you call out. There are also services that allow you to send and receive work calls using your work number from your personal cell.

But, behind the scenes, the real device making the call is always known. What is needed is a trivial means of letting private attorneys pursue the civil fines - something that these traffic ticket type shops can handle. You could dial their number after getting a robocall, they'd initiate an automatic trace, group it with others that trace to the same organization, and pursue the fines. An attorney would work pretty hard for a percentage of $10K x 100 calls or so. Push that to 1000 calls and they'll gladly start trying to go after the foreign ones too. Perhaps they could find American assets to grab.

Re:Too late, almost

[jpaine619]

I cancelled my land line and block and ignore callers not in my contact list.

You're either full of shit or an idiot. Which is it?

You block callers not on your contact list? Right...... so when that Hospital calls to tell you that insert-loved-ones-name-here has been in a terrible accident, you're sending the call to the bit bucket?

Bullshit.