Robocalls? They’re so 2010s.
As bothersome automated telemarketing calls decrease across the country, robotexts are the new enemy No. 1 in the phone scam category. But they’re so difficult to track that it’s tough to know how many are pinging mobile phones, and who’s sending them.
“Definitely the trend seems to be an increase in the texts,” New York University associate professor of computer science and engineering Damon McCoy said. “Most phones these days have a feature to suppress unknown numbers when they call you. … Texts are a little bit more persistent.”
Robocalls have sharply decreased. Why?
According to the National Do Not Call Registry, about 56,000 fewer robocalls were made in June 2023 than in June 2022.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats, pushed for federal Do Not Call legislation in 2021 that would allow for prison time for knowingly violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and raise fines for falsifying caller identification from $10,000 to $20,000. A similar bill was introduced in the U.S. House this year.
But phone scams aren’t going away – they’re just changing, associate professor at Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology Rajendran Murthy said.
‘Stop scam calls’:What the federal government is doing to halt illegal robocalls
Why are robotexts so hard to manage?
The bottom line is, they’re hard to track and regulate.
Consumers are more careful about picking up phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, Murthy said, but that doesn’t really work the same way with text messages.
And when millions of texts can be sent in the time it takes to make a single phone call, it’s difficult to keep data on something so prolific.
Additionally, the current state and federal protections, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the National Do Not Call Registry, are not designed to keep up, Murthy said, nor do they work well for tackling international scammers.
“If you’re…
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