Sign North Dakota Banking Notice To Quit Online

Industry sign banking north dakota notice to quit online

hello everyone i am susan adams lloyd president and ceo of better business bureau of minnesota north dakota and welcome to robocalls disconnected on behalf of bbb and aarp we welcome you to today's program bbb is a not-for-profit organization with over a hundred years of experience assisting businesses and consumers and fighting fraud we have listened to you and know that you hate robocalls as much as we do and we are here today to bring you the latest information from the experts about curtailing and towards better understanding this daily news nuisance aarp minnesota is our co-host and long-time strategic partner of bbb aarp is an association of millions of americans over the age of 50 who share our concern over the illegal robocalls we are discussing today they run a program called the fraud watch network to educate people about scams and also advocate on behalf of their members to fight against fraud before we get started a few things of note we want to hear from those of you listening today and on your screen you'll see a chat box it's towards the middle of the screen as you scroll down with your mouse please type your questions in the chat box and we'll pause the discussion a couple times during the program to take questions and this is a great opportunity to connect directly with the experts so don't be shy secondly this program is being recorded and we will email all registrants when that recording is available and we hope that you'll share it with your friends and families and colleagues to get the word out about robocalls and then last a special thank you to other event partners this praise presentation is brought to you today by our colleagues in bbb across the upper midwest including bbb in minnesota north dakota wisconsin nebraska south dakota the kansas plains southwest iowa chicago and northern illinois greater iowa quad cities and the siouxland region thank you to these regional aarp office across the region as well and i'd also like to say a special shout out to our staff in the community outreach department here at bbb minnesota i'm so proud of the work that you do on a daily basis to fight fight fraud and protect consumers we're also honored as i mentioned to have four top national experts that you'll meet in just a minute but i want to introduce right now gia vang news anchor at kare11 television in minneapolis who will be our moderator this morning good morning gia i hope you are excited about today's program as much as i am susan thank you i am so excited and i just learned that susan was a former tv newser at kare11 so i feel just at home here thank you for joining me great to see you i love the folks at kare11 i'm so glad you're on board today thank you and welcome hello to all of our participants and those listening in today thank you for joining robocalls disconnected i am delighted to be your host to moderate today's discussion and our discussion as susan mentioned we have a terrific lineup of experts to help us understand what's going on with robo calls so first we have aaron foss with no more robo we have josh burkhugh with u.s telecom we have will maxson with the federal trade commission and we also have daniel stepanesich with the federal communications commission so a pleasure to be here with you all today and i do want to dig in now because we we're gonna have a lot of questions in this hour that we have but uh let's talk about concerned consumers who are asking about robocalls as susan mentioned we all know what they are we all get them me included but some people don't know how to stop them so we want to lay out some great areas understand the issues better so uh why don't we start with listening to a few examples of robocalls hello this is a courtesy call to let you know your prescription orders ready for pickup at walgreens located at the northeast corner of donegal and valley creek in woodbury and just so you know the pharmacies open 24 hours a day seven days a or check online at www.minneapolisn.gov please remember to shovel your sidewalk again the city of minneapolis has declared a snow emergency parking thanks for connecting i am the virtual assistant for the us department of health insurance plans for citizens my purpose is to distribute important information to you about new medical plans offered at a significant discount due to open enrollment which ends on december 15th these plans offer 100 coverage zero deductible and income protection in case you become sick and are unable to work using the latest artificial intelligence automation okay so as you might have heard some of those robocalls sound legitimate and if you thought that you're right uh some of them are but there are some that you heard i think one that is not so let's get started and let's talk to josh right now uh josh can you just kind of give us a lay of the land why do we get so many robocalls sure thanks gia and thanks um bbb and aarp for having us telecom on this um like so many things in our modern world it's because of how technology has evolved and specifically because of the rise of internet technology the telephone system used to be operated by just a small number of trusted providers and it was built based on that trust you could trust your caller id because only a small set of providers could generate it but on the other hand in those days you would pay a lot for long distance calls now a total relic of the past and you pay a ransom for international calls technology and specifically internet technology has changed this there are now thousands and thousands and thousands of providers powered by voice over ip technology or voip competing with each other to take traffic around the world for fractions of a penny less than the other this has made calling anywhere in the world cheap and easy for you and me but these same technological advancements have made it incredibly easy and cheap for individuals here in india in the dominican republic the philippines and elsewhere around the world to make millions and millions and millions of calls using fake numbers a practice we call spoofing in order to perpetrate fraud when it's cheap and easy to make that many many calls you only need a small success rate for it to be a profitable enterprise josh thank you for helping us to understand why this all started uh will i want to get to you because we're we did listen in on those robocall examples and there are some that are legal and there are the illegal ones so can you speak to this and kind of uh help us understand which ones are legal and illegal sure uh and thanks thanks to the bbb and aarp for having me i'm glad to be here um so under the ftc's rules it's it's fairly simple so if a call is trying to sell you a good or service it's trying you know it's part of some sort of sales pitch if that call is playing a recorded message a pre-recorded message which is what what those calls that you just played earlier all of them played those are what we would call robo calls and those are not going to be legal unless you've given that company express written consent to call you which most people are not going to do so if it's trying to sell you something it's going to violate the ftc rules if it's playing a recorded message if it's a live caller so if there's someone actually on the other end and they can speak to you and it's not a recorded message then under the ftc's rules if it's trying to sell you some sort of good or service in that call the call will be illegal if your phone number the number that they called is on the do not call list uh and unless you had given them you know permission to call you those are generally going to be illegal calls and so if you get those calls then you know we encourage people to go to ftc.gov and file complaints about them because that's how we uh find out about the bad guys try to locate where they are and those are really the the backbone of our enforcement efforts so we try to bring our enforcement cases based on those complaints there's also state laws that can be a little different and fcc has separate rules they're a little bit different but generally speaking of the ftc's rules that's the the bright line if it's a robocall trying to sell you something it's probably illegal and we will get to the nitty-gritty of uh you know law enforcement and how that all works in just a bit too um but first i want to go back to josh and josh talk about the telecommunications industries uh role in preventing these unwanted robocalls sure they so they're we we are taking in close collaboration with with the government a multi-pronged um effort to try to stop these calls they're kind of three main things where we as an industry are doing first voice service providers and partners like nomo robo are working to detect and then label or block illegal calls so millions and millions of these calls are getting blocked before they ever reach anyone that's one thing we're doing second voice service providers are actively deploying a new color excuse me car id authentication framework known as stir shape the stir shaking framework this in combination with some rules the fcc has put forth is really going to make it restore the trust in the caller id so that when the caller id says it's coming from this entity it's actually calling from coming from that entity and it's going to make it much harder for some of the bad guys to pretend to be the irs pretend to be the ssa pretend to be legitimate businesses and then the final thing we're doing is my organization us telecom leads what's known as the industry traceback group um we as an industry when we hear these robocalls we actually trace them back to their source we find out where they're coming from they they may hit um anywhere from five to ten different providers on along the way the way this works and we'll go try to find that provider and try to stop um the providers from taking that illegal traffic and then you know when we're successful we try to cut it off the source when we're not um we we make referrals to our fcc ftc and state ag friends who then do what they do in terms of bringing enforcement against some of the people responsible for these and that's a great segue to my next question because some people may be confused about what the ftc or fcc does so let's ask will and daniel will let's start with you can you give us a brief overview i know you gave us some points but what does the ftc do sure so there's three main prongs to the ftc's efforts to stop or reduce the number of unwanted calls the first and most important from our perspective is law enforcement so we've filed 150 law enforcement actions involving unwanted calls against more than 900 different defendants and in many of those cases if there's fraud or deception involved what we'll do actually is we'll file our case in secret under seals the defendant doesn't know what's happening we'll go in with the police and actually physically raid the boiler room or the call center and shut it down freeze their assets and try to put the company out of business and then we'll litigate against them so we do that a lot we do that all the time just last week we filed our second law enforcement action against a voip service provider so a voice over internet protocol service provider for assisting and facilitating or under our allegations that is uh illegal calls so that's a big part of our of our efforts we work with other law enforcement like fcc u.s telecom as josh mentioned the traceback efforts to help us trace a call back through the phone network to figure out where it originated second a lot of work on technological innovations because we know that law enforcement does not it's not going to loan solve this problem just like law enforcement doesn't solve theft or you know robbery just because it's illegal and there's law enforcement doesn't mean it's gone so for years we've spent a lot of time working on trying to spur private industry to come up with technological solutions we've had a lot of uh consumer challenges where we've given prize money to people to try to come up with the best solutions to try to help stop unwanted robocalls aaron foss one of our panelists here i was one of the winners of one of our first challenges for his call blocking tool that he came up with and then third is his consumer education trying to tell consumers what they can do which is a which i've already mentioned first if you get an unwanted call i suggest going to ftc.gov i complain about that call there's lots of different law enforcement that have access to that complaint database and that's going to help law enforcement try to put a stop to those calls and then second also trying to educate consumers about what they can do proactively which is among other things talk with your phone provider about the call blocking filtering labeling solutions that might be available to you and also warning them about the different scams that can be perpetrated through these calls and how not to give money to these people not to provide gift cards and if you don't recognize a number in many cases we say the easiest thing might be to do to not answer it let it go to voicemail and if it's important call you'll get a voicemail and you can always call them back i'm definitely in that boat of not answering when i don't recognize a number uh we'll we'll talk more about some solutions too and some things that people can do right now to take action i know we're getting some questions in the chat box but i want to get to daniel really quickly about what the fcc does daniel thanks for having me today uh so the fcc's role and we share a lot in common with the ftc on these fights against uh robocalls uh are although some of our authority is a little a little different we tend to be a little more focused on the technology that is being used uh and one of the bigger differences is we can we also do bring enforcement actions against um non-telemarketing calls since those are uh non-telemarketing calls uh including political robocalls are um prohibited to cell phones without consent uh but overall we have sort of three la our we have a three-part role uh our first area is establishing the rules and regulations that prohibit or otherwise govern the making of robocalls so some examples of this would be interpreting what how what is needed for consent for the call um or what are some exemptions to uh to the tcpa but some other than some other recent actions we've done has been have been call blocking orders that have given more authority to your to your voice service your telephone provider to actually prevent those unwanted robocalls from even reaching your your phone and then we're also working with industry to develop um protocols and uh the big thing now is this stir shaking protocol which is will allow for uh better information on that on the caller id that is displaying on your phone to authenticate that caller that caller id and to give you better information so you can know have a better sense of actually who is calling you our second prong and that's the work that i primarily do is uh the enforcement actions against um violators so we will investigate based off of complaints that we receive from consumers but also tips that we might receive from industry uh we will investigate a robocall incident and uh bringing enforcement uh enforcement action if that there is a violation of the law so in fact the last few months we've done we had a 225 million dollar proposed forfeiture against a health insurance robocaller in texas and we just recently finalized the 10 million forfeiture against a political robocaller in california in the four calls are made in the 2018 election and then also a 37.5 million dollar forfeiture against um a affordable enterprises of arizona that was involved in spoofed um home improvement robocalls and then our last um prong is consumer education and awareness our um we'll put out consumer alerts on the way to scams and also we have a whole complaint process for consumer for consumers to file complaints about robocalls to the commission daniel thank you um i want to get to susan now let's check in with our chat box because i see that there are a lot of questions popping up oh my gosh the chat box has exploded and in fact we got many questions in adva ce of today's calls it's very much on everybody's mind and i just want to share with our participants two things number one we'll do our best to get the information on all questions we're not going to be able to address them all today but we will do our best in our communication through email afterwards to get the answer to these questions because they're all good and the second thing i wanted to share is that empathetically i really do understand uh i have an elderly mother with dementia and i'm on call 24 7 and now not being able to answer my phone because i suspect these robocalls i'm conflicted of whether i answer whether i don't and so i'm eagerly as interested as you are in trying to get to the bottom of that many of the questions that came to us uh in advance were having to do with you know how do we stop it and we heard from our experts today through the ftc ftc.gov does have some resources but with uh some of the general senses are with spoofing being so much a part of how these fraudsters um are are out there and they're um robocalling us does it really do any good to report the number that's listed and does blocking really work and then the last thing i would say in general people are wondering is there a difference between robocalls and robo-tax so those three questions have popped up in a number of uh ways and if the experts could any of them could address that it would be most helpful i so i i i can take at least the the first part and i think probably will be joined by my my friends at the fcc and ftc on this yes many if not most of the numbers are spoofed there still can be merit in providing the number in the complaint to the law enforcement authorities whether that's the fcc or ftc or another authority and one of the reasons why is when we run tracebacks when we trace back the source that's one that's one of the reasons that our traceback process exists it's because the numbers are spoofed if you know the number it's coming from it's very easy for dan or will to go right to the provider that provides that number and find out who their customer is when it's spoofed that's harder that's why we do tracebacks is because even if it's spoof we can go back and we can go back through the call path to find where that came from so it still can be valuable to provide that um on the blocking front i'm sure aaron has had some more thoughts on this um blocking is not just based on the number it's much more dynamic it's much it's based on all sorts of um information about traffic being seen in the network the duration of the calls um aaron is definitely the expert here so i'll defer to him but it it is much more dynamic and much more powerful than just this is a bad number we don't trust it great and are there differences between robo calls and robo text or is it essentially the same process there the there is a very different architecture for text and robocalls and there's also some differences in in in the laws that apply some laws do apply to both under current interpretations but it it is a it is a bit of a different architecture so that causes some changes both in terms of how we can deal with them um it makes some things easier you know you can have automated systems reading text to one once you detect something that is problematic that's easier to do than voice calls that have to sort of be transcribed um so it is different um but you know the industry is obviously very focused on doing what we can to stop all the above great and one last question before i send it back to gia that's popped up are there differences between mobile robo calls and and landline calls or are they the same family of annoyances and and precautions so the the calls that are coming in the especially when we're talking about overseas fraud where they're just sending as many calls as they can um they don't care they don't know they don't care um there is because of how the technology has evolved there is differences in the legal regime that applies um and the law that um dan at the fcc enforces there are some differences between the restrictions that apply to cell phones than the ones that apply to landlines um but again as i said a lot of times when we're talking about these fraudsters who may be overseas they're they're just calling as many numbers as they possibly can they're doing which you've probably seen a lot of times called neighborhood spoofing so it looks like it's coming from your number or similar number to increase the chances you pick up all that's just automated technology um sending those over ironically i got one of those neighborhood spoof calls two minutes before we started this call isn't that funny and it looked like uh it was very similar to my husband's uh mobile number i knew not to answer it but it made me laugh that uh i was just about to jump on this webinar yeah gia back to you thank you susan yeah um i get a lot of those boost calls too and we'll talk to will in a little bit about why scammers are able to spoof caller id but first let's get to aaron and have him join the conversation erin despite what people may think uh there are some good uses for robocalls so can you talk a little bit about that yeah we're uh we're absolutely getting into the weeds here with all the the robocall and discussion and the technology and the law enforcement everything uh well our view here at noma robo me personally like we're on the ground with the consumer right and we're all saying that robocalls are annoying and we kind of laugh at it everybody makes jokes and things but um the key to it i think is that they are really disruptive they are scams they are trying to steal money from from consumers usually going after uh more elderly people people that are in financial situations especially now with the pandemic right there these are criminals they're all over that and the the part that's really kind of sad about this whole thing is um the phone system is really just getting overrun with this to the point where you don't answer any call that you don't recognize unless they're in your contacts well what about covid test results what about school closings what about tornado warnings what about all the best way to reach every single person in the united states right no matter where they are in the country is through a phone call you don't need any special equipment you don't need anything uh expensive you just need a phone line um and there's a ton of really valid uses and again even going into the what's a legal robocall what's an illegal robocall what's a wanted robocall what's an unwanted robocall a robo text look we have one definition is a there are wanted calls friends families neighbors right people you do business with things that are important to you and then there's the unwanted ones and that's kind of like where the the battle that we're fighting every single day here the rubber meets the road all right so what what about the difference if robocalls are used by your bank or school district versus if they're used by salespeople or pollsters or is that kind of what you're talking about when you talk about wanted unwanted yeah and i'm not going to get into the legality and all the pieces and i've read through some of those laws but will and dan and everybody over there can do a way better job all i know is that there's right like however you define it and maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder right the the unwantedness so we have this a lot where um people's uh kids will have graduated from high school but they're still getting those robocalls from the school so they report that number as a as an unwanted call um as josh said though our analytics right we're not just gonna go and block that call or that number because you have to go and actually look into it um so those kinds of things there are a ton of really good uses for it i think that the you know i've been at industry conferences where the uh the banks and the the weather you know the weather alert people have have said like nomurobo and the call blocking companies have created this problem where they can't get their calls to her anymore and what i have to say is no we we didn't do anything right it's these illegal robocallers that have completely messed up the whole place all of us on this call everybody who's watching everybody who's you know using you know buying products and buying services and things that are helping to stop it these are the people that are really helping to get that trust back into the phone system i think that's what we all have to agree on is we need that trust back in if it's stir and shake it if it's you know call blocking call labeling consumers being able to answer the phone again i mean that would be a great place to be i hopefully uh this is this will help gain that trust back um aaron thank you will let's talk to you i know that josh had mentioned um spoofing caller id um why is it so easy for scammers to be able to do that i mean it mainly goes back i think to the development of the phone system in the us which is that it was it's an old system and it's a it's a dumb but simple system that allows you to put in just a little bit of data into every call that then gets transmitted along the call path to the end consumer and i'm part of the little bit of data that's in there part of it deals with uh billing details so if you're trying to you know trace a call for purposes of of who's going to pay for long distance and things like that and part of it is also what is the caller id number and it's simply a number that gets plugged in by the person making the call and there's nothing really in the old system at least that could tell whether you actually had the right to use that number so you can pick whatever number you want so if if you're spoofing caller id you could program your system or your dialer to spoof the white house switchboard phone number you could you can spoof the ftc's number which as has happened before you can pick any number you want you can pick numbers that are close to the number you're calling which is the neighbor spoofing that was talked about earlier you can program it just to run an algorithm where it it's going to run some random number that's within a certain number of digits of the number you're calling and you can have it change dynamically every call if you want every few calls every day however often you want to change which makes that data largely useless to people because if it can be so easily fake there's just no way to know whether it's real or not their stern shaken which josh and dan both mentioned is something that's been in the works for several years with engineers and scientists that come up with the technical processes that are used for the phone network have realized as we're getting into a newer phone network that is based more on ip telephony and not old copper network there's more information that can be transmitted with a call and so it's easier now to put in things like certificates that can validate whether you actually have the right to use the number that you're placing the call with and then the end user their phone carrier can check that certificate it's all complicated there's no reason to get into the to the weeds on that but it it can theoretically tell you whether the person that made the call if they use a caller id number did they have the right does their carrier know they have the right to use that number that's being rolled out right now and that kind of uh information will be transmitted to you through your carrier probably or on your phone and there might be a check mark or some kind of word verified uh authenticated something like that to let you know that it has been authenticated but while that's useful it doesn't obviously tell you whether the call is a scam because a scammer can also get the right to use a phone number and place what would be considered an authenticated call so you you can't you don't know that an authenticated call once this gets rolled out to everyone you don't necessarily know that it's not a scam but it will at least hopefully cut down on things like neighbor spoofing the neighbor spoofing might happen but it should show up as an unauthenticated call and so at least you would have some information before you answered the call all right this is unauthenticated there's a pretty good chance that this is not actually my neighbor calling me this is not someone in my community this is someone trying to fool me that's all getting rolled out really as as we speak the fcc has put in um rules requiring carriers to implement this in a certain amount of time it's happening across the country now but it's it's obviously not here yet and while it will be an improvement it's it's not going to completely solve the problem we're still going to have unwanted calls and we're still going to have scammers calling people lying to you about who they are well thank you well for answering some of the questions coming into the chat box that i saw people asking when is this going to be rolled down you're saying it it's happening now but um still kind of a slower process it's happening now and much like vaccines we'd love it to happen sooner but it's going to take a little bit of time i think all right so let's uh talk about some legislation let's talk about the traced act and i wanted to ask you daniel about this um president trump signed this in 2019 it was then uh implem implemented in 2020 and now we want to see if there are any positive impacts from the tradition which was supposed to make it easier for our consumers to id robocalls so they can avoid answering them correct so yes i mean so the traced act introduced several provisions and i mean multiple provisions that the fc the fcc is currently uh implementing we've implemented a couple uh so and one example of something that was we've implemented we have implemented and look and we look forward to now using this new authority is that the trace act increased the penalties for intentional robocall violations and also made it easier for the commission to prosecute cases against robocall violators previously i had to go through several different procedures before i could actually bring a case against a a robocall violator but now thanks to the trace act i can go directly to imposing a financial penalty against that robocall that robocaller and then another big part of the traced act was congress mandating stir shaking implementation and so the current mandate is june 30th 2021 but only for iep phone networks and so that is one of the difficulties of stir shaken is that it's um it's much easier to implement for an ip based phone system but still a lot of consumers have copper are have copper wire service and that is going to be a continuing challenge of how to implement caller id authentication over those uh copper wires so the ip portion will be implemented will be mandated uh by this upcoming summer and that's pretty much the main the main changes there was a couple other things for the commission to look to look into on different types of calling behaviors or behaviors by some voice service providers that are often doing business with the robocallers and that so that will all be being rolled out in the upcoming months great giving some folks some timelines there um let's get to susan now because our chat box is pretty busy and i see some really great questions in there great i was just looking at both my phone and the chat box that i'm stuff coming in right now and i just want to say one more time we're going to do our best to capture all of these questions and do our best with our experts to get other feedback to answer these questions because they're so good and they're coming in so quickly and as i mentioned they even came beforehand so we have we'll consolidate them and do our best to give some salient answers but both bernie and charlie asked about uh a question does the answering accidentally or on purpose any of these numbers validate uh something to put you on an extra list or by actually pressing one either accidentally or on purpose you know make things worse and what happens in that situation are you getting more global calls because you've answered one or somebody explain how that process if you're a bad guy doing robocalls what is th process behind that i can chime in on this week there's been a lot of research done about this also and the research showed that you actually didn't get more robocalls if you interacted with them anecdotally though we see that when people push a number when they especially if they antagonize the caller right everybody's like oh i play music for them i you know you know i they'll harass them we recommend that you do not do it right just there we've actually seen some of the robocalls get vindictive against some of those people just had that with a guy that i was talking to they then you know he was he was antagonizing them they took his phone number and spoofed it in their out their next batch of outgoing calls and then he had a ton of people that were calling him and saying why are you calling me and like it wasn't me it was the robocaller so yeah in general um the data is split whether it actually does that but we would say do not do is it the end of the world if you accidentally push one no do you have to go and burn your phone and you know move out of the country no right don't push one don't interact with them if you figure out if you find yourself and you're in the middle just hang up um and that's what we usually recommend for people i'm laughing only because all these robocalls make me want to burn my phone just the way you said that was it's true i mean again like it's the thing right so many people just where they're changing they're not you also changing your number you're not going to get away from them because these guys are actually sweeping the phone network to go and find out they're looking at all the internal databases they're looking at the people also like once they port their numbers to a different carrier they're like wait all of a sudden now i'm getting more um robocalls that actually is a pattern these guys are looking at the porting numbers they're looking at that data so yeah there is not a lot of ways around this obviously using call blocking and labeling solutions uh you know using carriers that that label and block for you and then you know working with government working with people doing more and more this is i saw something about covet it was called like the swiss cheese um uh view where there was like different layers of the swiss cheese and certain parts of the virus were getting through some of those holes but when they got to the other one they were getting blocked right so if joshua's telecom is doing what he's doing will it the ftc is doing what they're doing and dan at the fcc is doing what they're doing and not people at nomurobo are doing what we're doing and every consumer there's hundreds of people on this call you know live right now if they're doing what they should be doing that's really where i think that the big success is going to be in winning this battle we can do it it's just really really difficult it is really really difficult and just because i have you on the line right now we keep getting a couple of questions on a very fundamental basis when we use the term spoofing i explain that in a very simple way so people understand what spoofing is i know we we've we've been talking about it throughout but what is spoofing and how do we recognize a spoof number at the very basic level yeah this is a great uh kind of set the stage and will alluded to it that the caller id whatever the number people think that that goes back to a real phone line right that was like that in the 80s the 70s right when alexander graham bell was like putting those together nowadays though that field is you can basically fill it in with anything that you want i like to give the analogy that it's like a uh the return address on an envelope right yeah i i could write you know wills i could write the ft i could send you a letter that says it got sent from the white house right does that mean that that's where it came from no and are there markers right if it gets stamped in new york where i am is that going to be a telltale sign that hey maybe that return address isn't uh what it says so right when they're spoofing and everything setting that number anybody can set it to anything that's in in telecom um shaken and stir is really there to prevent people from being able to set it to anything um and then if we wanna go and slice it right the neighbor spoofing are numbers that look like they are they're usually from your area code from your state especially now with mobile phones popping up the city and state um and it's all in an attempt to get you to pick up because you think it might be you know your church or your school or you know your prescription reminders or things like that so yeah technically spoofing is just setting the number there is nothing else behind that it's super simple great two other quick points here and they're not quick things as much they're heartbreaking uh a couple of people have asked questions relative to the social security uh administration reaching out or somebody mentioned they got a notice that they had purchased some bitcoin and they needed some interaction relative to the purchase of that neither of which seemed to be true and one can feel you know their hearts thinking if there was a message from the irs or from social security that there's something wrong which taps into your heartstrings and makes you want to respond what's the right response when those kind of scary messages come how do you know if they're real or they're not unless you engage with these bad guys yeah the the sim the simple answer is assume they're they're fraudulent right we we worked with nbc on the story that ran yesterday amazon and uh you know is if you get oh your package isn't out there or apple or anything like that if it's coming in over the phone system and you're not using you know you the blocking call labeling assume that it is not real right that should be your default and then it has to prove itself i saw that story it was a good one awesome good job on that other comments on those questions from the other panelists oh yeah those calls are are scams the social security administration is not calling you the irs is not calling you um you know our advice is don't answer those calls if you get a call that's telling you this is the irs this is the social security administration this is the police immigration any government agency hang up they're not trying to reach you that way it's a scam you don't want to talk with them you don't want to deal with those people in the extremely rare instances when the government needs to reach you for something like this they're going to figure out a way to reach you through the mail they're not going to be calling you on the phone so just hang up and don't deal with those people because they're scammers and nothing good is going to happen by you interacting with this camera that's really helpful advice we find through bbb here another fraud related activity that sometimes stop look and listen you know really think about with the irs call me in the middle of the night about back taxes from 10 years ago probably not but that's that it's it it creates panic especially if it happens at a time where you can't reach a live person uh and we oftentimes encourage people to find uh the legitimate number on the website to verify uh but the person who wrote in about social security said you know they're desperately trying to find answers now and it's stoked up all sorts of fear and concern so these robocalls go from being a nuisance to being actually a nightmare pretty quickly you can get their number you can go to the social security administration's website and call them up if you feel the need to do it but there really is no need to do that if they're calling you it's a scam you don't need to check there's nothing no due diligence you need to do you just need to hang out and you make a really good point on this this is why this scam is so insidious also there's a ton of shame if you fall for it right even like blaming the victim oh how could you be so stupid or they don't want to tell people especially in their family especially for a lot of older people right they don't want to tell their family or they are convinced that they've won some lottery and that this is the way that they are going to be you know they're they're uh they're going to be making all this money for their family and either one or two things happens right they won't believe that it is a scam or two if they realize they they don't want to talk about it so we kind of encourage people um to be open to talking about this because you can help other people it's nothing to be ashamed of right it's it's absolutely these guys these are criminals they are really dare i say great at their job their job is stealing your money and these are the people that are the best at it are going to be going that have no morals are going to be going here um so it's nothing to be uh you know shameful or anything it just it happens and protect yourself and then help others oh go ahead dan the word of advice i always give to to consumers is that when you're giving a call and it's supposedly coming from the social security administration or the irs is you know hang up that call and then go go find the irs the social security the consumer hotline number call back that number that is listed on the uh the irs website uh call that number back and and that way you can be for sure that you know what you're who you're dealing with is an actual agent of a government agent government um official who is uh and that way you can avoid those uh those scams because like most most of the time the government is not going to be contacting you first by a phone it's going to be there's other forms that they're going to reach out so whenever in doubt go hang up and find the public the public hotline number of the government agency superb geo back to you thanks i do want to segue into the pandemic because aaron talked about you know people are very vulnerable right now and they may take these calls very seriously because they are in a vulnerable position so can we talk about um what has changed with robocalls in the last eight to nine months um and anyone can weigh in on this one we've seen uh so when the pandemic started we immediately because getting those good calls through is vital right you can't be stopping closings and all those pieces so we had to we saw a market increase of legitimate robocallers uh robocon with good messages so making sure that those get through was super important but again now like contact tracing uh uh some of those healthcare screening check-ins uh all of those right are getting polluted with all of the junk that's coming through luckily we haven't seen a ton of we'll call them like covid scams in general there are especially a lot more on the robo tech side very few calls are being called or being robocalls are being made that are trying to entice you with that you know some sort of covet messaging we have seen that that's very rare um we'll say like you know shady ppe and gloves and masks we saw that at the very beginning and things like that um so yeah being cautious but at the same time and again like how is the ordinary consumer supposed to know if that health check-in is a real thing if that's a contact tracer that is legitimately trying to call or text them to let them know they've been exposed or it is a scammer i'll tell you it's virtually impossible does anyone else have anything to add about what you've seen maybe during this pandemic will or daniel johnson yeah i can add a little bit what we've seen on particularly on the enforcement side uh particularly starting back in march we were seeing a large uptick in calls that were mentioning coba 19 and the pandemic and these sort of calls sort of fell within two buckets bucket one was clear clearly fraudulent calls that were uh for example saying that there was a you know covet tests available before kova tests were publicly available at the time uh so those were uh clearly fraudulent calls another like bucket of calls were your typical uh robocalls in particular your health insurance robocaller or your student loan rubble caller and they were tweaking their message around to say that they had special relief for covid or some sort of mentioning of code and here at the fcc we found we found both of those calls extremely offensive but even the latter offensive because it was taking advantage of people's anxiety during the pandemic and so we along with the ftc uh were very aggressive on with these robocalls and we released some joint warning letters to providers that were allowing for these calls a lot of these calls were originating overseas so we sent warning letters to these um providers that were allowing this traffic to come in from foreign sources and saying if you don't cut this traffic off we are gonna we are gonna allow other providers the united states to to cease doing business with you to stop all of your calls that would i mean essentially put that provider out of business unless they um cleaned up their act cut off this bad actor and continue to monitor their their customers to prevent this these bad actors from rejoining their net from their network so that was an example of a uh of some inaction that we took uh during the pandemic and we are continuing to monitor these types of calls thank you daniel all right i um want to in the interest of time um do kind of a circle round and ask you all um the big question that some people are wondering is how do you halt or limit the number of robocalls uh josh let's start with you so you know as i said there there's actually a lot of things going on that are stopping a lot of these calls from getting to you already so we wish we could stop them all we're trying to stop them all but a lot of them are being stopped and that's not always fully seen but for those who are interested in doing a little bit more um you can get add-on services nomorobo has one you can download apps there are others out there as well but but since aaron's on the panel today i'll focus on nomirobo um you you can see what tools your your voice service provider has available most of them by default are blocking a lot now most of them especially cell phone or labeling calls is spam likely um some of them offer white label services i saw someone mention that in the chat where if you really you have someone in your family who's particularly vulnerable you can get them one of the services whether it's from your provider whether it's from an app provider that only calls from the family gets through everything else goes to voicemail you can check those voicemails because to aaron's point sometimes the analytics get wrong sometimes legal calls calls you want maybe it's a health related call maybe it's a contact trace call um sometimes those might look like um for one reason or another on a legal call um but you get in voicemail and you check and you say okay this is a legitimate call i'm gonna and just for that i'm gonna google the number look it up and call back rather than just the number they provided um so those those are some of the ways i think um folks can do it there there are ways but just i do just want to flag that we there's a lot you aren't seeing that is actually stopping a lot of calls that would otherwise also be getting through yeah for sure i believe we've talked about some of those things uh will let's get to you what can people do to stop illegal robocalls well there's there's a lot that that's already happening that is happening and then obviously more that we can do to to to keep that going and i started in this area about 10 10 plus years ago and at the time there weren't really any call blocking and filtering solutions um you know we would sometimes have a hard time getting the big carriers to get involved in things like trying to shut down bad traffic or paying attention to that issue um you know there were a lot of challenges out there and in the last 10 years those things have changed there was also really no hope on the caller id front it was just the wild west you you didn't have stir shaken so you just felt like you were looking at a future where you were never going to be able to have any trust in caller id we now have us telecom that he ps with trace back with its members to help law enforcement try to trace these calls back through the network we have lots and lots of call blocking and filtering solutions like errands and there are many others third-party apps through your carriers some of it's happening in the phone network and you don't even realize it and then lots of enforcement on lots of uh of interest and and effort put into law enforcement which is still very important so that ftc is putting a lot of our efforts in towards law enforcement investigations litigating against these people that are responsible for the calls not just the telemarketers but also the companies that are really helping them make these calls and i mentioned earlier the case we filed last week against a company that we accused of assisting and facilitating these calls it is a voice over internet protocol uh phone service provider that we allege just assisted lots of different people making illegal calls those sorts of efforts fccs the states that kind of stuff has to continue and to allow us to continue to do that we we need to hear also from the public so we need to have the complaints come in because that's what lets us know where we can try to focus our efforts it helps us track down the bad people it helps us build our cases and then when we're litigating against them in federal court which we have to do we have to we have to win in court we can't just bring our allegations and have everything over we have to fight them in court um the information that we get in those complaints is really helpful and so consumers can know you can help us by filing those complaints you can help us by not giving these people money don't give them if they ask for gift cards to scam they're you're not going to be paying for anything legitimately with a gift card that's a scam government calling you no it's not happening just hang up don't deal with those people and contact your phone provider and see if if you're interested in getting less calls there might be some call blocking or filtering solutions that could help you either not get them in the first place or at least have some indication on your phone of the fact that this might be a scam this might be a kind of call that you're just not going to want to answer thank you daniel yeah and pretty much i mean i'll echo all of all of that it's the same thing that we've been doing here at the fc at the fcc seeing the same recommendations that we're making i mean our one of our key pitches is always in finding ways to empower consumers and so that's been um promoting the call blocking apps or sending out providing more information to consumers so you know what is a scam what is not what is not a scam what is the what is the latest scam you can find um those uh those alerts on on the fcc website uh then uh but then another key component is the is is the consumer complaints those your complaints to the f's to the fcc are vital for me when i bring an enforcement action uh against those robocallers and i absolutely i love to you know throw in those quotes to a particularly um you know juicy complaint where it's saying you know that really where that outrage of that call is just coming in through what the consumer has written into our complaint center because that's just a top is that's just powerful when i am putting in uh that uh that language into my into our enforcement orders uh and likewise you know i my my ability to bring enforcement actions really does rely on that the information that is coming to me on what are those um the violations that are there and i can only do that through um through complaints from from consumers so uh i mean so the things that what's most important is it's continuing to file complaints about the calls that you receive uh and uh yeah reaching out to your reaching out to your carrier to see if there are any other options for blocking those blocking calls and then adding a a call blocking app uh onto your phone if i can just jump in i know it can be frustrating for folks that there is not a silver bullet to stop all robocalls not stop robocalls for your phone i i know i'm sure folks would have loved to hear us say if you do a b and c you'll never get a robo call again if if we had those solutions no one would be getting robo calls we wouldn't be having this panel but i can say even though it doesn't feel like it based on the the numbers of robocalls you all are receiving the way we are going uh the government's going and the enforcement the way we are going as an industry the way the services like no moreover exists we are we are fighting back in ways that are not always obvious we are making tremendous progress there will be a point in time where we you are going to get less robo calls or it will be harder for the robocallers to make robo calls and it'll be less profitable for them so it will decrease but it unfortunately we have to preach some patients right now taking actions to protect yourself you protect your family but we we are you know investing a lot of time effort on doing everything we can to solve this and aaron i want to give you the last word um as they've mentioned nomorobo um is a a company that you a service that you can get just to limit some of these calls um anything else you'd like to add that will or josh or daniel mentioned yeah obviously i'm highly biased right we offer nomurobo it's free on landlines um we have a free trial for mobile and then it's two dollars a month right is it perfect no nothing in this world is um but to the point what josh was also saying was that the more data that we have and more real-time data that we have behind the scenes right noma robo and us telecom and the ftc and the fcc are that real-time report hey what are you seeing even all the carriers are you seeing this are you seeing that um the good news is according to our stats the number of robocalls is actually decreasing the percentages it hit its crescendo a couple years ago and has been steadily declining uh it's still well over 30 percent of calls so basically you know if your phone rings you know 10 times three of them are going to be scams at least right that's not even counting the neighbor spoofs and things like that but i i would echo what josh says right the protect yourself use services use apps like nomorobo like the competition work with carriers that are putting in spam likely and scam likely to protect yourself and your family um and then same deal like know that things are happening right there is no way to there's no big switch that just says like robocalls and just flip it off and then you're done um but we are getting there this this technology is it seems so modern right we all have these brand new devices in our pocket but like this technology goes back decades and and maybe even you know maybe even up to 50 or 50 years ago right caller id was introduced in the 80s and i don't think it's changed stern shaking is the first thing that's really been been new to will's point right before numero before 2013 is there was really no there was no appetite even for the carriers to be blocking these calls so yeah i think that the it is the maybe if we end on a hopeful kind of note it is getting better and everybody that's here and learning about it and doing more and for all contributing i think we are going to win win this this this war thank you aaron and i think that personally for me i'm able to take something away today where i can take action and uh try to try to halt or limit some of those calls that i get i just got one while we were chatting here so um i appreciate all the experts with me today josh will aaron daniel um and i appreciate the bbb for having me at aarp minnesota also for having me so i'll pass things back over to susan thank you gia thanks for everything that kare11 does in the community and we appreciate your talent and expertise and facilitating today's discussion i learned a lot i get weepy when i hear these wonderfully uh dedicated professionals that are locked arm in arm with bbb and and help us you are wonderful partners and thank you for your time and expertise there's lots that has been done that gives me some ounce of encouragement but it sounds like we all have a lot of work to do so i'm officially knighting everybody on this call all participants to help get the word out this call will be recorded and shared via youtube you within 24 hours you'll get a notice via email of where to find that and as well we'll do our best to answer all the questions that were in the chat in an ongoing way bbb.org is often a great resource as well as aarp.org and so we'll continually update this information here on this slide you can see some contact information of all the parties that were mentioned today don't be afraid to call us at 1-800-646-6222 bbb is here to support you we are a not-for-profit organization and that's what we do is we help consumers and businesses and particularly the area of fighting fraud before we wrap up today i want to also put up a survey question i think we have that if i'm not mistaken team this will help us as far as gather information as far as feedback uh for these kinds of seminars which we do a lot of but i if you would just take a moment you can point to the screen and answer the questions that will only go to us it won't sign you up for any robo call promises scam emails this is just going to our team here at bbb and we'll be sharing this information with our strategic partners and it just helps us hosts and panelists can't vote but everybody else should be able to and that information will afford us a chance to gather some information and serve you so with that i want to thank you so much for your participation thanks for what you do to get this information out in the community especially for your support for bbb and aarp we hope to see you on another one of these webinars soon have a great day happy holidays everybody be well and safe thank you