Cheap Internet phone service is leading to a boom in overseas fraudster robocalls—many of them victimizing senior citizens—but help is on the way, the Senate Special Committee on Aging was told Wednesday.
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology has enabled foreign companies, typically from India, to make millions of scam calls for less than one cent a minute, helping cause complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about the fraudsters to climb to 150,000 a month from 63,000 six years ago.
As a result, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to consider a proposal as soon as next week from its Chairman Tom Wheeler that would give telephone companies the right to block robocalls.
“They think they have an obligation to connect every call,” committee member Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) said.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the committee chairwoman, said this is step is needed to protect seniors from the victimizers.
She noted that when robocallers hide their identity (a practice called “spoofing”) and use Caller ID to pretend to be from the Internal Revenue Service or the police, some senior citizens become scared and can be easily hustled into doing whatever the scamsters demand.
“The technology does exist for us to deal with this problem. We need to push the telephone companies in the name of consumer protections,” said Collins.