The FCC took action recently to block certain kinds of robocalls. These are the automated calls we are all familiar with where you hear a recording when you pick up the phone. The FCC estimates that there are over 2.4 billion robocalls per month. If you read the news articles that came out after the FCC order you would assume that this order means the end of all robocalls – but it doesn’t.

The FCC action is intended to eliminate robocalls that come from spoofed sources. Spoofing is when the caller hides their phone number or changes the originating number for caller ID. Callers have numerous reasons to spoof calls. Some spoofers are scammers and use robocalls to initiate fraud. For example, the IRS says that over $26 M in fraud is done each year from robocalls posing as tax collection calls. Other callers use spoofing to avoid the Do-Not-Call rules which is supposed to prevent solicitation calls to people who have elected to not receive them. If the number that shows up on caller ID is wrong, then there is no way for the FCC to catch or fine a caller from violating those calling rules.

The FCC accepted a proposal from a ‘strike force’ of large companies like AT&T, Google, Apple and Comcast to tackle the issue. Some spoofed calls will be relatively easy to block, like when spoofers use numbers that can’t be real such as 000-000-0000. But spoofers also use disconnected or unused numbers and these will be more challenging to find. A spoofer could use a legitimate number for a short time and abandon it before being blocked. Spoofing is similar to computer hacking in that it’s a game of cat and mouse – and you’d expect spoofers to figure ways around any schemes to catch them. It will be interesting to see how effective the strike force is at blocking spoofed calls.

But it’s important to remember that a lot of robocalls are legitimate and will continue. First, anybody is allowed to make a legitimate robocall to people who are not on the Do-Not-Call list. But even if you are on that list, all sorts of entities are allowed to call you. For example, any merchant like a bank, credit card, insurance company, cell phone provider, etc. is allowed to call their own customers. Government are allowed to call citizens and that means that political robocalls are legitimate as well as calls from other parts of the government. Certainly nobody is against localities that send out robocalls to warn of tornados, flooding or hurricane evacuations.

And some robocalls are useful. For example, the high school where our daughter goes calls once a week to tell us about things going on at the school. For the most part these are things that you would never hear about from your child.

There is no doubt that robocalls are a huge issue. The FCC says they are by far the number one type of complaint they get. I haven’t had a landline in twenty years, but the last time I spent a few days at my mother-in-law’s house, who still has a landline, I was amazed at the number of solicitation calls she got per day – both robocalls and from live callers. She’s on the Do-Not-Call list and still gets 5 – 10 calls per day.

I think a lot of people will be surprised to find that the FCC’s action won’t stop legitimate robocalls – and that has to be a huge percentage of the calls made. Your bank and other vendors that call you are doing so legitimately and do not try to hide who they are when they call. And I think that when that sinks in that the public they will be disappointed. That fault lies with the many misleading news articles declaring the end of robocalling. The FCC was clear in its own declaration that this was an action taken to try to eliminate scam calls. But if history has taught us anything it is that scammers will always find a way to do what they do. This order may slow scammers down, but they will find other ways to scam people – including figuring out how to still call using robocalls. I hope the strike force can find a way to stop this, but my guess is they will just slow it down, at best.