S. 151

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, earlier today, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act, known as the TRACED Act, authored by our colleagues Senators Thune and Markey.

I am pleased to have been a cosponsor of this bill to help protect consumers from fraudulent, aggravating, and incessant robocalls.

The TRACED Act makes a number of important changes to our laws that will make it easier to fight illegal robocalls.

Most important, the TRACED Act requires telecommunications carriers to implement what is known as SHAKEN/STIR technology to verify whether caller IDs that appear on incoming calls are authentic.

When fully implemented, this technology will be a major advance against the illegal spoofing of calls that have resulted in successful scams.

Combating illegal robocalls has long been a focus of the Senate's Special Committee on Aging, which I chair, and on which the Presiding Officer serves.

Over the past 6 years, the Special Committee on Aging has held 22 hearings to examine scams that specifically target older Americans. Scams that we have highlighted include the IRS imposter scam, the Jamaican lottery scam, computer tech support schemes, grandparent scams, elder financial exploitation, identity theft, and the notorious drug mule scam.

The number and the kind of these scams are endless in their variety. The criminals are ruthless and relentless, and they will continue to come up with new ways to defraud Americans, particularly our seniors.

These scams are often initiated by robocallers who use caller ID spoofing to perpetrate their schemes. Many of us remember back in 2003 when the Do Not Call Registry was created. At that point, what we were able to do was register our phone numbers and block those unwanted, illegal robocalls. Fortunately, back then, telecommunications equipment could not easily be used to disguise a caller ID to make it look like the call was coming from someplace other than its origin.

Unfortunately, technology today and particularly the emergence of the voice over internet protocol technology has changed all that to the point where the Do Not Call Registry has become virtually useless for most Americans. Now criminals can use VoIP to hide their identities while generating millions of robocalls from anywhere in the world at practically no cost.

We heard in the Aging Committee some heart-wrenching stories of consumers who have been ripped off because of the combination of the robocall and the disguising of the identity of the caller.

For example, in 2015, we heard from the Auburn, ME, Police Department about a woman who lost $7,400 because she got one of these calls, and it was followed by another call that appeared to be the Auburn Police Department. That is what appeared on her caller ID. Yet, of course, it was nothing of the sort. But that was sufficient to make her think she really did have to pay what turned out to be $7,400 of her retirement savings, which she could ill afford to lose.

In 2017, we heard from an 81-year-old veteran from Portland, ME, Phillip Hatch, who was a victim of the IRS imposter scam. In these scams, what happens is the robocaller pretends to be an IRS agent. He or she will tell the person who answers the phone that the consumer owes thousands of dollars in back taxes and penalties and that if they are not paid immediately, they will either be arrested or a lien will be put on their home. They manage to panic people of all ages-- particularly our seniors--into paying money they do not owe to the IRS.

Everyone should be aware that if you really do owe back taxes to the IRS, you will get a letter from the IRS. You won't be called up and threatened. But that, unfortunately, is what these con artists, these ruthless criminals, do.

Well, Mr. Hatch was induced to pay some $8,000 when he got a second call that appeared to be from the Portland Police Department telling him that if he did not pay up immediately, there was a warrant for his arrest--again, completely bogus. Mr. Hatch did not owe back taxes, much less penalties, but it was the spoofing of the call that made it look like it was from the Portland Police Department in this case--the Auburn Police Department in the previous case I described--that caused him to lose a substantial amount of money. His situation would have been even worse if his son had not intervened. He would have lost even more.

This is a problem that is getting worse every day. Oddly enough, lately on my cell phones, I have been receiving robocalls that are in Chinese, which is really bizarre. I don't know whether they are targeting a Chinese-American population in some part of the Washington, DC, area, but that is what I have been getting lately. But all of us know how frequent, how annoying, and in many cases how dangerous these robocalls can be when they are conducted by these ruthless criminals.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission logged an incredible 3.8 billion complaints about illegal robocalls. This year, industry sources estimate that nearly half of all mobile phone calls are fraudulent-- nearly half. So this is a problem that deserves our attention. The American people are tired of having scammers ring their phones off the hook--or their cell phones--and they want these calls stopped. We have to do all we can to give the regulators the important tools to help fight these illegal robocalls.

I am very pleased that we have taken an important step today and that the Federal Communications Commission is also acting to increase the protections for consumers. We should be able to rely on the veracity of our caller ID identifications. That is why we have caller ID. But the spoofers have managed to defeat the purpose of caller ID, including being able to pretend to be the Department of Treasury, the Auburn Police Department, and other law enforcement agencies. No wonder people pick up the phone when they see the Department of Treasury, the Auburn Police Department, or the IRS is calling, but, in fact, that is not who is calling; it is a relentless criminal who is trying to steal money from the consumer.

It is my hope that this important consumer protection bill, which builds on all of the 22 hearings our Aging Committee has held, will become law shortly and provide relief to American consumers.

Thank you, Mr. President.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source