Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said Wednesday he and a group of bipartisan legislators are backing the ROBOCOP bill, which seeks to protect citizens from scam and spoof robocalls.
The Repeated Objectionable Bothering of Consumers on Phones Act, which was sponsored last week by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., would require phone companies to offer tools to consumers that would block potential scam robocalls at no extra cost. Blumenthal made his statement at the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing.
“The simple fact is that the Do Not Call list is totally ineffectual against them, the evidence is that consumers still are plagued with them,” Blumenthal said.
“The ROBOCOP bill will require phone companies to offer effective tools to block robocalls to consumers at no extra cost to them. At the same time it will enable emergency calls or others for legitimate purposes to continue as a robot’s mechanism.”
In an effort to stop legitimate robocalls from getting blocked as part of this legislation, the bill also includes a provision that, if passed, would require that emergency and other legitimate robocalls go through.
The bill would require service providers to offer subscribers the ability to identify that a call was originated from an automated dialing system or coming from a prerecorded voice, and give them an option to opt out of receiving such calls with the exception of emergency or public safety calls.
At the hearing, Blumenthal emphasized that these robocallers are able to use something known as “neighbor spoofing,” which is a service that makes it look like the call is coming from the same area code as the person receiving the robocall.
