Just so you know: it’s not normal for your country’s voice communications networks to be completely hijacked by scammers and marketers, rendering it almost unusable. That’s literally not something people in most serious countries have to deal with. Yet we’ve largely normalized the fact that Americans are so inundated with unwanted scams and bullshit that they don’t answer the phone.
Americans have received 4.1 billion robocalls so far this year, or around 135 million each day. A recent survey by Talker Research of 10,500 general population adults indicates that Americans get twice as many scam calls and texts as any other country (and even more than countries that have passed useful consumer protection laws and have functional regulators).
A new study from Consumer Reports, Aspen Digital and the Global Cyber Alliance indicates that there’s been a massive uptick in text messaging-based scams over the last year, especially for younger American consumers aged between 18 – 29 years old
“Cyberattacks and digital scams continue to cause serious harm to American consumers, often with devastating consequences,” says Yael Grauer, program manager at Consumer Reports. “Government and industry must do more to protect consumer privacy and security, but with federal consumer protection agencies facing reduced resources, it is even more critical to empower consumers to adopt strong cybersecurity practices against increasingly sophisticated scams and attacks.”
Instead, the Trump administration and its extremist courts have effectively lobotomized the U.S. regulatory state, making it difficult or impossible to pass any new consumer protections or enforce existing ones. And the FCC already wasn’t particularly good at policing robocalls. The country has generally been too corrupt to pass even a baseline internet-era privacy law.
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been taking an absolute hatchet to the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the guise of improving government efficiency. Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, among other things, has involved plans to eliminate rules that make it easier for U.S. consumers to opt out of unwanted text or phone communications.
Carr’s also derailing a number of FCC cybersecurity reforms, often with no coherent reason. A sizeable chunk of our robocall is caused by big wireless carriers that turn a blind eye to scams and fraud because they get a cut — and Trump is making it all but impossible to hold these companies accountable for anything. And all of this is happening with less transparency and public input than ever.
So however bad you think scam and marketing texts and calls are now, they’re extremely likely to get significantly worse. This is the end result of an unholy alliance of authoritarianism and corporate power. A fake populist movement stocked with corrupt zealots, dead set on dismantling the country’s last vestiges of consumer protection.
Like so many systemic U.S. problems, the robocall and phone scam problem simply isn’t something that gets fixed without first embracing much broader corruption, campaign finance, lobbying, and legal reforms. That is, obviously and indisputably, not something that’s happening under Trump and his sycophantic regulators and telecom industry-coddling courts.
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