Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
Whom do we know in Utah? Or Pennsylvania? Or northwestern Indiana?
Nobody, maybe. But someone’s calling, during a business meeting, or while you’re feeding the baby, or walking the dog, or trying to take a nap.
Often you take one look and end the call. Sometimes it’s a tough choice: Robocalls from another city, state or country can be masked to look like local ones.
According to YouMail.com, which monitors the problem and offers anti-scamming apps, more than 5.1 billion robocalls were sent out just last month. That’s 2,000 calls per second, though, to some, that estimate may seem low.
Robocalls are more than an extreme annoyance. They make it more difficult for legitimate callers to get through. What if your agent really has been “trying to reach you about an insurance problem?” Worse problems await those who not yet cynical enough to ignore these calls, which are designed to trick you into giving up private information or sending money. Unfortunately, the ploys sometimes work, and people are cheated.
The Indiana attorney general’s office continues to go after illicit telemarketers. But the state’s “Do Not Call” list, enacted in 2002, hasn’t kept pace with the ever-evolving technology of telephone scams.
Friday, two members of the U.S. Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee announced a bill that would block and fine such fraudsters at the federal level.
South Dakota Republican and committee Chairman John Thune, who introduced the bill with Democrat Ed Markey of Massachusetts, noted that traditional enforcement focused on mistakes by telemarketers, not intentional fraud by robocallers.
“This enforcement regime is totally inadequate for scam artists,” Thune said in a release.
There’s a growing sense the Indiana Legislature also will have to decide whether to try to catch up to the crooks technologically.
As the January session looms lawmakers need to add fine-tuning the state’s Do Not Call law to a long list of must-do’s.
