Have you been badgered with unwanted phone scam calls lately? On Sunday May 12th, Senator Chuck Schumer, announced his support for a bill to tackle the intrusive calls. According to the Democrat’s office, New Yorkers were bombarded with a whopping 293 million robocalls in April alone. That figure amounts to 112 calls per second, and 11 calls per New Yorker. “It’s a plague that we’ve got to cure — whether it’s the landline or cell phone, no one should be woken up in the dead of night by multiple robocalls,” said Schumer in a statement.
As reported by the NY Post, in NYC alone, there were 141.86 million such calls reported, as per Schumer’s office. People with 917 numbers received the most robocalls, or 48 million calls in April. Outer-borough, 347 prefix numbers, received the second most, getting with 42.3 million. The sought-after 212 Manhattan area code, received the fewest interruptions relatively, with 2.3 million spam calls targeting them.
Schumer is co-sponsoring The TRACED Act (Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act). It will aim to deter criminal robocall violations and improve enforcement of section 227(b) of the Communications Act of 1934. The bill will try to cut the cord on scammers by stepping up civil penalties of up to $10,000 per bogus call. The bipartisan bill will also extend the statute of limitations, so that perpetrators can be liable for punishment for the robocall offenses from one year to three years after each incident, as per Schumer’s office. If enacted it will give the FCC and other federal agencies more tools and authority to trace, prosecute, and enforce fines on robocall scammers. It would also require telephone service providers to adopt call authentication technologies, enabling the carrier to verify that incoming calls are legitimate before they reach consumers’ phones.
The act was originally fabricated in 2018 by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) a member of the committee and author of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. “As the scourge of spoofed calls and robocalls reaches epidemic levels, the bipartisan TRACED Act will provide every person with a phone much needed relief,” said Markey. “It’s a simple formula: call authentication, blocking, and enforcement, and this bill achieves all three. I thank Chairman Thune for his partnership on this effort, and look forward to seeing this legislation through to its passage.”
“Incessant and invasive robocalls — all times of day and night — generated by scoundrels who have programmed bots are a metastasizing plague that we must find ever new ways to confront and beat back. That are not just a nuisance, they are often the fly paper that traps unwitting consumers in nasty rip offs,” said Schumer in a written statement prior to the announcement.
