Robocalls – Dispatches From The Front

Melinda Walsh, a former marketing consultant, gets up to eight robocalls on her cell phone on any given day — not counting the few that come through on her landline.

The constant chorus of robocalls — “your account has been compromised” and “your car warranty has expired” — became a backdrop to her life. It’s a game of “whack-a-mole,” she said. “I have 54 blocked numbers in my phone … and it’s programmed to silence calls that aren’t in my contacts or that I have not called.” Yet the calls keep coming.

Walsh lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which receives the most robocalls per person in the United States, according to data from YouMail, a robocall-prevention service that tracks robocall traffic across the country. The city averaged 39 robocalls per resident in February, YouMail found. That’s more than two and a half times the national average, which is about 14 to 15 calls monthly for each person, according to YouMail. Baton Rouge consistently ranks in the top 5 US cities for this metric.

THE SUPREME COURT has produced many memorable moments in its 231-year history, but today was surely the first time a toilet audibly flushed in the background during oral arguments.

Such is the reality of conducting Supreme Court business during the coronavirus pandemic. This week, for the first time ever, the Supreme Court began holding oral arguments over the phone. So it’s fitting that one of the cases argued this morning was itself about phone calls.

Robocalls, to be precise. Federal law has banned automated calls to cell phones since the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, though with limited effectiveness. (At the time the ban was passed, cell phones were a novelty and seemed to merit special protections. In the years since, of course, they have become the default for most American households.) In 2015, however, Congress added an exception for cell phone robocalls seeking to collect on debts owed to the federal government.

Tag: Robocalls

What it’s like to live in the robocall capital of America | CNN

Is There a Constitutional Right to Make Robocalls? | WIRED