The attackers struck without warning during the hectic holiday season, pinpointing a target in our homeland from half a world away.
It was your home telephone.
And even though you quickly realized what the evildoers were doing — telemarketing or even worse, scamming — you felt powerless to make them stop.
All you could do was hang up. Maybe you even said something that gave you a nanosecond of satisfaction. But you knew you couldn’t stop them from calling and conning (or harassing) again.
For years you thought your Caller ID would tip you by flashing “Caller Unknown” or some 800 number. But that is so very 20th century. Today’s con artists start by conning your Caller ID; they can make it show any fake number they want.
You thought this stuff would be stopped way back when you signed onto the U.S. government’s “Do Not Call Registry,” run since 2003 by the Federal Trade Commission. Now the FTC concedes technology overtook bureaucracy. Evildoers in distant lands can cheaply use computerized robocall operations to blast-call limitless random numbers in the U.S.— hoping to con you into revealing credit card or financial info.
Birkham Bandy, coordinator of the FTC’s Do Not Call program, has no illusions that his agency is close to finding solutions to halt faraway phone call criminals. He likens it to trying to develop a foolproof filter capable of halting the phone call equivalent of email spam — but far more challenging, technologically.
“It is not going to happen overnight or in the next few months,” Bandy told me. “But it can happen in a couple of years.”
The problem centers on “Caller ID spoofing,” he says. While emails must originate from a specific address, phone callers can disguise the originating number.
So far, several significant steps have been taken — some publicly, others quietly.
Opt out of robocalls
A new website — nomorobo.com — was created through the FTC Robocall Challenge, a public-private initiative. It works with Internet-based providers, not copper-wire based carriers. It seeks to identify robocall efforts that are not legitimate (distinguishing between scams and legit efforts such as school closure notifications). Then it blocks the illegitimate robocalls. The website is free to all — just register your phone number and opt in.
That reminds us of the power of big-name geopolitical clout — the sort that can be commanded at levels even higher than Bandy. For instance: President Barack Obama.
Since Americans of all political persuasions are fed up with phone scammers — perhaps we’ve finally found a common cause: we’d like to see Obama become the outspoken champion of all who are fed up with phone call cons and crooks.
Perhaps he can harness secret expertise within the National Security Agency so we can better track down and shut down robocall scammers who operate overseas unhindered by unseeing authorities.
Indeed, perhaps the president can forge a new highest-level global effort to halt all this high tech harassment. Other efforts have reportedly targeted phone numbers in Australia and Canada.
Clearly, none of this rises to levels of war and peace. Or does it?
After all, it does hit us all where we live. We may have finally found a declarable war in which everyone — all leaders, all people — end up winners. Except for the con artists, scammers and crooks.
Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Email: martin.schram@gmail.com
