A high official with the Federal Trade Commission says complaints to the agency from Missourians upset about robocalls have doubled each year since 2009. That’s one of the things coming from a Senate subcommittee hearing presided over by Senator McCaskill. The committee is asking how the increasing number of fraudulent robocalls can be stopped. She says phone companies have to look more closely at new technology to filter robocalls. And she wants federal regulatory agencies to become more involved. Associate Director Lois Greisman of the Federal Trade Commission says the FTC has held a contest to encourage development of that technology and three proposals have risen to the top. “The goal was to spur innovation, to tap into the genius of the American consumer…I think it was enormously successful; there were three winners.”
McCaskill says this country should not be ten years behind Canada, where a robocall filtering service already exists.
The FTC reports getting more than 200,000 complaints about robocalls every month. The Federal Communications Commission says its robocall complaints doubled between 2010 and 2012.