The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has voiced that they want to end robocall harassment of consumers. Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, has “made clear that the FCC’s top consumer protection priority is aggressively pursuing the scourge of illegal robocalls” along with robocall TCPA attorneys.
Despite the FCC chairman’s proclamation, robocalls have continued to harass consumers. Approximately 3.4 billion automated calls were conducted this April, almost one billion more than last April according to YouMail. The FCC says they are taking steps to reduce this number but the efforts have apparently been ineffective, leaving consumers to scramble to private robocall TCPA attorneys to make the calls stop.
One of the new efforts by the FCC is to permit phone companies to block calls that come from potential “spoofing” or invalid numbers. Also, the FCC has adopted a proposal to create a database of reassigned numbers to prevent business from continuously calling the wrong people. Most recently, the FCC fined a man $120 million over a complaint that he made 96 million robocalls over three months out of the Miami area. A judgement like this could have also been obtain by a private robocall TCPA attorneys
The FCC has not limited criticism of robocalls to exclusively “illegitimate” businesses, but also including aggressive robocalls from legal businesses that have been known to harass people with excessive calls.
The National Consumer Law Center’s senior counsel, Margot Saunders, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and showed that only 10 percent of the top robocallers in the United States were scammers, using information from YouMail. This is often reflected in the efforts of practice by private robocall TCPA attorneys.
Last year, Margot Saunders registered an FCC complaint against Navient representing 6 different consumer protection groups in reference to these cases in request to hold Navient accountable for breaking the law. The FCC did no such thing and allowed Navient’s actions to go unhindered. This leaves only robocall TCPA attorneys to be able to take action for harassed consumers.
Navient along with a other businesses have filed for exemptions from the FCC for the actions subject to robocalls. These filings are currently pending and the FCC is potentially leaning toward not enforcing the law against “legitimate callers”, according to Saunders. However, a private robocall TCPA attorneys would still be able to take such action despite potential FCC exemption. This leaves any remedies to private actions for robocall TCPA attorneys to protect harassed consumers.
