‘Very inconvenient, annoying’: Some say robocallers are using two new tactics to beat the system

CHARLOTTE — Steven Clinkscales owns a surveying company and says robocalls are constantly interrupting him.

“I get them every day, 10 or 15 (calls),” he said.

His wife, Kim Clinkscales, who is a nurse practitioner, says she doesn’t answer numbers she doesn’t recognize. But sometimes, it’s a number with a doctor’s office calling and she ends up having to return the call.

[ALSO READ: ‘There’s no silver bullet’: What’s being done to crack down on robocalls?]

“It is very inconvenient, annoying,” she said.

Government agencies and major phone companies took several steps this year to combat robocalls.

However, scammers are using two new tactics to stay ahead, according to Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

First, the group says the callers use technology to send their messages “straight to voicemail” and that the callers claim that, because your phone doesn’t actually ring, they “aren’t really calling at all.”

Some consumers feel otherwise and have even sued over voicemail-only calls. Action 9′s Jason Stoogenke found cases in California, Florida and Illinois.

Secondly, Stateline says scammers buy or steal “lists of real phone numbers to trick spam-blocking software into letting the calls through.”

Last month, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein led all state attorneys general in sending the FCC a letter urging the agency to make it harder for scammers to get their hands on such lists.

Stein says more consumers complain to his office about robocalls than any other topic. At last check, he told Stoogenke he had received about 9,000 so far this year.

In 2019, 51 attorneys general, including Stein and 15 phone companies, launched the Anti-Robocall Principles.

[ALSO READ: ‘Beyond annoying’: Robotexts on the rise as regulators crack down on robocalls]

The companies agreed to offer free call blocking and labeling that reads “spam risk.”

They also agreed to use “call-monitoring analytics” to identify suspicious robocall “traffic and patterns.”

And they agreed to use STIR/SHAKEN, which became a reality a few months ago.

Stoogenke reported that the technology identifies who is making the call and ensures the number on your caller ID matches that.

In other words, it combats spoofing.

Right before the pandemic, Stein launched a website and a robo-report hotline so North Carolinians could report robocalls more easily.

A few months later, Stein and six other attorneys general sued two companies for “blasting billions of illegal robocalls.”

Stein says more than 75 million of those calls were to North Carolina users and that more than 34 million calls were to numbers on the Do Not Call Registry.

>> Remember, you can watch our radar/newscasts anytime at home on Roku, Amazon Fire and Apple TV

The FCC fined the same companies $225 million, the largest fine in the agency’s history.

Stein says his team is now investigating certain phone companies.

“Some of them are turning a blind eye to this robocall traffic because they’re making profits,” he told Stoogenke.

These companies aren’t household names.

They’re middlemen, patching robocalls through to the companies you and I use, including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

The Federal Trade Commission has constantly issued warnings reminding people to just “hang up.”

Advice:

Don’t answer numbers you don’t recognize
Don’t trust the number on your Caller ID (it may be spoofed).
Don’t give out personal information
It’s worth signing up for the Do Not Call Registry, but it only weeds out some of the calls. It doesn’t block everything.

To file a North Carolina complaint: www.ncdoj.gov/norobo or 844-8-NO-ROBO.

For more information and to file a federal complaint: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/robocalls.

(Watch the video below: Robotexts on the rise as regulators crack down on robocalls)