Bad news. Your car’s extended warranty has expired. No, wait, your health insurance premiums are in danger of doubling. And now the IRS says there’s a problem with your tax return.
Don’t worry, there’s good news, too. You’re eligible for a low-interest home improvement loan. And your government stimulus check is ready to be wired to your account.
Those are all lies, of course, fed to you over the phone by scammy robocallers, automated operations that call millions, billions of phone numbers trying to fool people into sending them money. There is a federal “do not call” list that you can register for that’s supposed to stop you from receiving unwanted automated sales calls. It does not work particularly well.
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is pushing to bolster the state’s laws against robocallers, hoping to provide more protections and enforcement mechanism in the Sisyphean battle against spam scam callers.
A 2021 poll of more than 2,000 people, conducted by The Harris Poll for Truecaller, found that nearly 1 in 3 American adults say they’ve fallen victim to a phone scam. Nearly 60% of Americans said they’d received scam calls or text messages within the last year.
A study from YouMail, a robocall blocking app, found that Washington residents received . That’s 80 robocalls for every person in the state.
The Federal Trade Commission has, over the past decade-plus, filed hundreds of lawsuits against companies for violating…
