I’ve been watching these hearings for seven years and I cannot remember anyone ever throwing the Department of Justice under the bus–much less all of the witnesses in a hearing spending a significant portion of their time doing so.
Normal industries hire lobbyists to tell government officials how to help their businesses. The telecom industry hires lobbyists to tell them how to help the government. Something has changed here. Either FCC Chair Rosenworcel sent out the green light to do this, or Megan Brown opened the floodgates and years of pent up frustration came pouring out.
Either way, I am sure Josh Bercu has been yelled at quit a bit since Tuesday.
I annotate so you don’t have to.
Margot Saunders, National Consumer Law Center
The failure to solve this problem is not a matter of technology. It is a question of whether the people in power actually want to solve the problem.
Megan Brown, Wiley-Rein on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce Cybersecurity Council
You can insure that your hard work bears fruit by encouraging the Department of Justice to make robocall scams and illegal spoofing a priority…DoJ, however, is a vital partner here; and Congress should urge the Department to make enforcement a priority by acting aggressively on the referrals it gets from the FCC and by bringing its own cases directly for violations of laws like the truth and Caller ID Act; but also mail and wire fraud for some of these really egregious scams.
Senator Fischer
Since 2020 the FCC has issued $700 million in forfeiture orders for TCPA violations. However, hardly any of these have been collected, mostly due to the Justice Department’s failure to pursue these cases in court in its obligations under the TRACED act.
The DOJ also seems to have missed the opportunity to submit a report with meaningful recommendations.
Ms. Brown, do you believe that the justice department is doing enough to ensure that bad actors carrying out illegal telemarketing and robocall schemes pay the penalties that the FCC assesses?
Megan Brown, Wiley-Rein on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce Cybersecurity Council
Thank you for the question. And in my written testimony, we explain: no, I don’t believe the Department of Justice is doing enough; and you can sense that frustration from the FCC chairwoman. They certainly at the Department have a lot of tools that they can use both to enforce FCC orders, but on their own to bring righteous mail fraud, wire fraud cases and enforce the laws that you all have passed. So, yes, we believe the United States Department of Justice could do more. And, as a former DOJ official, I think it is a missed opportunity for them.
Senator Fischer
So what can we as Congress do to make sure that they do enforce those rules that as you said, they have the tools. So how do we get them to use them?
Megan Brown, Wiley-Rein on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce Cybersecurity Council
Well, I think that one challenge is it’s hard for Congress to direct the Department of Justice to take specific action due to separation of powers; but you have a lot of power to nudge DoJ and shape expectations. And in my written testimony, we offer a few examples. In the Traced Act, for example, you impose some pretty robust reporting obligations on the Federal Communications Commission. We think, similarly, you could impose those kinds of updates mandates on DoJ to let you all know what they’re doing. We also suggest that DOJ should prioritize funds for investigations and enforcement and you all can direct some of that. And then requiring DoJ for example, to establish a robocall enforcement and education office. Right now, within the department, I think, much of their robocall effort is housed under an Elder Justice Initiative. And I think that’s, that’s really important, obviously, but they can do more and I think Congress can really look into that and impress upon them that this is a priority.
Senator Markey
It’s unbelievable targeting robocallers is like an endless game of whack a mole.
Josh Bercu, VP USTelecom
I agree with my colleague here, Megan, that criminal enforcement against these individuals, these groups, that’s organized crime abroad doing this, is absolutely critical because that’s the only way they’re going to stop trying to defraud Americans if they if they’re taken off the board.
Senator Budd
So, you mentioned the enforcement agencies, what could some of them do to improve the success rate of stopping these foreign place robocalls?
Josh Bercu, VP USTelecom
So, I think criminal enforcement is key. A few years ago when the Department of Justice FBI worked with the Central Bureau of Intelligence in India to raid some of these call centers. Government impersonation scams went down almost overnight. So that is key. It’s really working with those partners abroad and bringing people to justice I think is the key.
Senator Tester
So the question is, does Congress need to do any more or is this all about enforcement?
Josh Bercu, VP USTelecom
So I think when we’re talking about fraud, one of the themes is that the fraud actors changed their behavior. They’ve moved from robocalls to more targeted calls and some of the tools we built for robocalls don’t work as well for, for a live call.
Tester
Senator Tester
I very seldom get live calls. I get a call from a damn computer that sounds like a live person, that then, if I stay on long enough goes to a live person…
Your view, what we can do to stop, not to slow down–we’ve been slowing down forever–but to stop these folks? Anybody have anything that Congress can do to stop them…or?
Mike Rudolph, CTO YouMail
We track thousands of active campaigns per week and current enforcement efforts are just working on the highest volume uh prioritize campaigns. So your specific robocall if you can get your state or you can get the FCC to put that on the priority list, that’s one that we’ve got the tools and the techniques to diffuse. There’s just not enough manpower to, to, you know, have a priority list that goes more than 10, 15 campaigns deep. So if we can get, we can start working, you know, 50, 100 campaigns deep on a week to week basis, the FCC has showed effectively, you know, that the, the highest volume campaigns can be stopped.
Senator Tester
Just for the record, if any of, you know, how many of these are done out of state versus in country, out of country, I would love to know that information.
Senator Vance
It seems like we keep on tinkering around the edges here a little bit. We sort of do these little things and maybe they slow it down to Senator Tester’s point; but we’re fundamentally allowing crooks to prey on some of the most vulnerable people in our country; people who are living on fixed incomes and so forth. And I guess I’m just wondering if we were willing to do something big and it’s one of the few things maybe that you could get bipartisan majorities in this house, or this chamber to do if we were to do something like really big here. What, what could actually stop this?
Josh Bercu, VP USTelecom
So the only way to get them to stop defrauding Americans is criminal enforcement.
Senator Vance
Do we have a sense of how many of these people are actually in America versus how many of them are overseas? And where are they coming from? The ones overseas? I mean, particular areas, you know, you sort of hear about Eastern Europe or Nigeria, sort of where are these things actually coming from?
Has there been any effort sort of diplomatically, legally to interface with some of the countries where this fraud is most common and actually use the extraordinary leverage the United States has to bring some of these folks to justice. Or is, is there sort of an added to like once it’s in another country, it’s such small ball things relative to other international crime, we don’t focus on it, but of course, it’s not small ball to the people who are affected by it.
Josh Bercu, VP USTelecom
I think criminal enforcement is key when the few years ago when the Department of Justice FBI worked with the Central Bureau of Intelligence in India to raid some of these call centers. Government impersonation scams went down almost overnight. So that is key. It’s really working with those partners abroad and bringing people to justice I think is the key.
Senator Vance
What, what could we do to help AI platforms and social media companies shield their data or tools from being used for more elaborate, you know, family emergency scams, things like that?
Senator Klobuchar
How can we make sure that tracing illegal calls to their origin results in actual enforcement action?
Josh Bercu, VP USTelecom
So I think what we’ve seen the, the FCC’s approach with the, the cease and desist, I think it’s been highly effective. They’ve targeted certain campaigns, they dropped off the face of the earth almost.
Margot Saunders, National Consumer Law Center
So first let me say that I believe that the number of scam calls that have appeared to be reduced because there’s been a reorganization or re-categorization of many of those calls. Many of the calls that had previously been identified as scams have now been identified as telemarketing calls.
Senator Klobuchar
Voice cloning, Senator Vance mentioned this. We actually had, someone I know that got one of these calls, his son serving in the Marines deployed. So I knew he was deployed, didn’t know where they get a call because they scraped his voice off the internet, asking for money to be delivered to somewhere in Texas. I’ve had two other military families tell me this story. I don’t this is unbelievable to me. So what are service providers, Mr. Bercu, what are they doing to get ahead of these robocalls made using voice calling? These are obviously targeted ones with the person’s voice, but all kinds of things could happen. And what can we do? Mr. Rudolph to mitigate this?
Mike Rudolph, CTO YouMail
Your specific use case is a, is a targeted attack and based on the investigations that we’ve done so far and did similar attacks, uh Those are um threat actors who have gotten a personal phone and a personal phone number, just like anybody going into a store to get a device.
Senator Klobuchar
Last thing, robotexts, there were over 12 billion spam texts to Americans just last month. I think I got half of them. And these texts often include links that install malware, malware and spyware on a consumer’s device. In March. The FCC adopted rules MS Saunders. What other measures should they consider to go at these illegal robotext?
Senator Welch
I know you’re trying to do stuff but it’s not working.
Senator Luján
Data that I’ve seen suggest that not all carriers may be knowingly doing this, but it seems to be that there’s a smaller number of carriers that carry more of the calls, that’s revenue.
Margot Saunders, National Consumer Law Center
We are recommending is that the FCC be encouraged or enabled, whichever is appropriate to act much more quickly against those problem, voice service providers that are inserting the bad callers, the bad calls into the network.
Senator Luján
…Also, industry: when something bad is happening, that cannot be self policed, ask for help.
How do we stop the nonsense? $39 billion being stolen in a year that should rise to any prosecutor’s attention. If the Department of Justice is not going to do this, then how do we find other partners that are willing?
