PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — They are annoying, they are scams, and many of the companies empowered to stop them aren’t.
According to consumer advocates, fewer companies than last year are meeting FCC requirements to mitigate robocalls. The average Pennsylvanian received 47 scam and telemarketing phone calls between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30 of this year.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Phone companies are required by federal law to install anti-robocall technology — programming that authenticates calls and prevents scammers from posing as the IRS, FedEx, or any other government agency or public corporation.
“I make a phone call, and I make it from my phone, and my phone company should be able to say, ‘Yes, this is Theresa. … she's not calling from the IRS, she's not calling from Bank of America, and then they let the call go through,” said Teresa Murray, a consumer watchdog director with the Public Interest Research Group.
But there’s one problem: less than half of the 9,242 phone companies in the United States have fully integrated the software.
“That's just dumbfounding … spam robocalls have increased by 20% so far this year compared with the same period last year,” Murray said.
Murray says phone companies do face penalties — 1,400 were put out of business in August for failure to comply with FCC rules. She says it's important to pressure companies to comply, and on the FCC, when the government reopens, to hold them accountable.
If you get an unexpected phone call or text, Murray says, “if it's Amazon, sign on to your Amazon account. If it's the postal service, call the postal service. If it's a relative who claims that they've been kidnapped, call the relative or call somebody else in the family.”