VIDEO -- At Commerce Committee Hearing, Klobuchar Questions Deceptive Robocall Practices

Hearing

"Lots of questions here I'll go fast. First of all, we know that after the TRACED Act passed in 2019, after new FTC rules were in place, the number of scam robocalls declined by almost half. Now we're having all kinds of new issues, and Mr. Bercu, who you noticed in your, noted in your testimony that we, that there is collaboration between industry and the FCC. How can we make sure that tracing illegal calls to their origin results in actual enforcement action?

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Okay, good. Ms. Saunders, why do you think, particularly these telemarketing calls, that these volumes are so high? I was, I mean, I was just looking [and] we've got so many people to under 221 million numbers registered on the Do Not Call list. And still, we're seeing a number of people call about violations. What solution should we prioritize here?

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That will be an incentive to be more careful.

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Okay. All right. Like it. AI voice cloning. Senator Vance mentioned this. We actually had, I had someone I know that got one of these calls. His son, serving in the Marines, deployed. So, they knew he was deployed but didn't know where. They get a call because they scraped his voice off the internet, asking for money to be delivered to somewhere in Texas. I've had two other military families tell me this story in Minnesota. I don't….this is unbelievable to me. So what are service providers, Mr. Bercu? What are they doing to get ahead of these robocalls using voice calling? These are obviously targeted ones with the person's voice, but all kinds of things could happen. And what can we do, Mr. Rudolph, to mitigate this?

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Right, I understand. Yeah, I'm not, actually, I'm just using an example; then it could get worse, right?

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Or turn into the voice of a general that they know, or a famous commander or something, anything, and it would go to all the military families. Or it would go to people thinking in some political person turns into a robocall. So I do think this adds to the danger. Last thing, robo texts. There were over 12 billion spam texts to Americans just last month, I think I got half of them. And these texts often include links that install … malware, and spyware on a consumer's device. In March, the FCC adopted rules. Ms. Saunders, what other measures should they consider to go at these illegal robo texts?

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All right. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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