In the last twenty minutes I’ve gotten two calls that the caller ID identified as being from some random city in the United States and which turned out to be recorded messages of unknown provenance making a dishonest pitch.
- “This is an important message about your student loans . . .” — clearly not a well-targeted scam given that I’m five years into retirement.
- “This is Visa and MasterCard calling . . .” — as if those two competitors would flaunt antitrust regulations by openly collaborating on a joint promotional campaign.
I get several calls like this a week. Most of them are obviously fraudulent, like the “Visa and MasterCard” call, but even those that sound as if they could be legit are clearly not since they fake their points of origin. This week I received multiple robocalls from “Healthcare 2020” — always the same recording but identified as originating in Lake Forest, CA; Egg Harbor City, NJ; and Newton, KS. If the source of these calls were accurately identified, I could block them, or at least know not to answer them. But that, needless to say, would defeat their purpose. Thus, the spoofing.
I do understand that phone companies can’t keep anyone from making a phone call, and they can’t even prevent people from making robocalls. But why is it still possible for anyone to fake a caller ID? I’ve long suspected that it’s because phone companies would need to spend money to prevent that from happening, and they’re not legally required to do so, so they don’t. Never mind that this kind of shortsightedness may cost them business in the long run. Phone calls are a less and less practical way of reaching people because so many of us have just given up answering our phones. You can leave a voicemail message but it’s usually easier to just send a text.
But as I began writing this, I remembered hearing something about legislation to limit this abuse, so I did a search and discovered that this past December Congress passed and the President signed into law a bill called the TRACED (Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence) Act.
Among other things, according to this article on TheVerge.com, the law put in motion a process that will require all wireless and landline telecom carriers to adopt technology called STIR/SHAKEN, which will allow them to cross-verify numbers on their networks in order to ensure that a call is coming from an authentic number and not a spoofed one. Evidently, the reason I’m still getting calls like the ones I received this morning is that “many provisions in the legislation will take months to implement,” according to the Washington Post.
It goes to show that Congress is capable of creating new regulations when something that companies are doing is seen as inexcusable by virtually everyone in the country. It’s too bad that appears to be the only circumstance under which Congress is capable of acting, but I’m counting my blessings.