DETROIT – No one with a phone is immune to robocalls, those pesky automated messages that can fool and defraud. And neither is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s 81-year-old mother.
“I’m the top law enforcement official in this state, I am the top consumer advocate in this state, and I can’t help my own mother sometimes, because I can’t remove the phone from her hand,” Nessel said Wednesday at a robocall summit hosted by the National Association of Attorneys General.
“And no matter how many times I tell her, ‘This is a scam, don’t fall for it,” she said, “she gets sucked in.”
Michiganders receive more than 1 billion robocalls calls annually, and Nessel’s office has been fighting back. She started a robocall crackdown team in 2019, combining initiatives that include working with service providers and federal agencies, publishing known scams and setting up phone lines monitored by trained investigators.
Outreach and education tours have been effective tools in warning people of robocall scams, Nessel said, but the COVID-19 pandemic slowed that down. Meanwhile, robocalls were “coming in fast and furious,” trying to trick people with coronavirus-related messages.
“We saw an enormous uptick,” she said, “and then it’s harder to communicate with people because how are you going to get this message out?”
One solution was creating videos to walk people through how to identify scams. In one, Nessel explains to an elderly couple who got a…
