Can phone companies do more to block onslaught of robocalls?

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Jeri Vargas put her elderly mother on the “Do Not Call” list years ago. So why is the 88-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease still getting several recorded phone calls a day pitching her everything from vacation cruises to medical alert devices and fire extinguishers?

The Federal Communications Commission has been asked to consider the question of whether phone companies could do more to stop the onslaught of “robocalls,” the automated phone calls favored by scammers. Since the convergence of Internet and phone lines, it’s become easy to blast out hundreds of thousands of calls in a matter of minutes to see who takes the bait. The question of whether these calls can be blocked has never been more pressing than around tax season, when many pretend to come from the IRS.

The phone companies say they worry that automatic call blocking might run afoul of laws requiring them to connect phone calls and have asked the FCC to clarify that it doesn’t. Many carriers offer call-blocking services to consumers, sometimes for a fee. But they also don’t want regulators to create any hard-and-fast rules, which they say could be difficult to implement.

Consumer groups counter that the phone companies are dragging their feet for no good reason and that, once given the green light from the FCC, could block most robocalls if they wanted.

AT&T says it’s not as easy as it sounds. Robocallers can easily “spoof” their identity and location by pretending to be from a legitimate source or by altering the caller ID. So blocking robocalls is “a bit like a game of Whac-A-Mole: just as numbers are identified for blocking, the robocaller spoofs another number,” the company said in an FCC filing.