It just happened again. One of my colleagues got a call this afternoon from the “local sheriff’s department” informing her that because she’d missed jury duty, there was now a warrant out for her arrest. She had, in fact, missed jury duty earlier this year, and they knew the details of the letter she’d received, as well as her former and current address. The phone number of the incoming call matched that of the local police station. Once they told her she needed to send “bail money” via Zelle, she realized it was a scam and hung up, but not before they’d wasted 30 minutes of her time and successfully made her panic. 

Last week, I got one. It was supposedly my bank, warning me of a fraudulent transaction on my account. They said I needed to click a button on the bank’s mobile app to verify that the transaction was fraudulent. I said that I couldn’t find any such button. No problem, they said, we could do it over the phone. Could I please just quickly verify my account number, date of birth, and Social Security number? The caller ID displayed the bank’s actual official customer service line. I nearly took the call for legitimate, but after some close relatives of mine were scammed out of thousands of dollars last year, I’ve become healthily suspicious of these things.

Spam calls have just reached a six-year high. Eric Burger of Virginia Tech’s Commonwealth Cyber Initiative says that it’s “mind-boggling how much is lost to fraud perpetuated through robocalls,” especially now that cryptocurrency makes it damn near impossible for people to get their money back. Many scammers are sophisticated in manipulating people. A couple of years ago, even a seasoned financial journalist found herself handing $50,000 in cash to a scammer, who had made her think her family was in danger and she needed to give her money to a federal agent for safekeeping. It’s tempting to scoff, thinking we ourselves would never fall for such a ruse, but the trick of scammers is to first make people panic by thinking something terrible is happening, then swindle them once their judgment is compromised. That’s why the “warrant out for your arrest” scam is one of the most commonly-reported fraud techniques. The stories can be truly heartbreaking—people sometimes even kill themselves after being scammed. And of course the whole situation is becoming vastly more disturbing now that AI enables easy, realistic impersonation of absolutely anyone. 

Scammers drive Americans bananas. I think we can all agree that they’re the absolute worst. As far as criminal immorality goes, I think many murders are probably more defensible than impersonating an elderly person’s grandchild and making them think the grandchild has been in an accident in order to steal their money. Yet strangely, even though there is essentially a universal incentive to stop scams, the United States is weirdly tolerant of them. Americans get twice as many scam calls as those in other countries, and the overwhelming majority of Americans report having been targeted (successfully or not) by scammers. As Eric Priezkalns of CommsRisk writes, despite the efforts of telecom lobbyists to pretend otherwise, “the USA is doing a terrible job at protecting phone users from unwanted and harmful communications.” Other countries, like Germany, Australia, and Italy, have taken aggressive regulatory measures to stop scammers.

Some efforts have been made here in the U.S. The 2019 TRACED Act required phone companies to implement authentication systems meant to ensure that callers were who they said they were. The “STIR/SHAKEN” protocols are supposed to make it harder for legitimate numbers to be spoofed—such as the call I got that looked like my bank—and have been required by carriers since 2021. (STIR stands for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited, while SHAKEN stands for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs. The protocols’ creators admitted they “tortured the English language” until they could produce a James Bond reference.) But as Alabama’s Representative Gary Palmer said in an oversight hearing, “implementation among smaller carriers has been delayed and bad actors have exploited these providers’ reliance on legacy infrastructure,” because smaller carriers haven’t implemented the updated caller ID protocols yet. Congress generally has been slow to do anything about the problem. A proposed bill called the Protecting American Consumers from Robocalls Act, for instance, would “[provide] all telephone subscribers, including small businesses, the ability to seek damages for all unconsented-to telemarketing calls immediately after such a call.” So far it hasn’t gone anywhere.   

A large part of the problem is that the U.S. government simply hasn’t gotten tough enough on the telecom providers that transmit scam calls to us. We could, of course, make them strictly liable for scams perpetrated by users of their networks, and put the burden on carriers to ensure callers are who they say they are.

If Verizon delivers me a call saying it’s from my bank, and it’s not, then Verizon could be held liable for the resulting fraud. But the U.S. has avoided being harsh on the corporations that facilitate delivery of the scams. The Republican Party is essentially openly pro-scam now, since the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the leading consumer protection agency.  The National Consumer Law Center recommends creating “an explicit cause of action against providers who assist or facilitate illegal calls,” and requiring “providers to investigate and block call traffic that displays suspicious characteristics, such as a high percentage of short-duration calls and other indicia of fraud.” A major problem here is that the industry itself has a major incentive not to root out scams, because even scam calls make money for providers. As Priezkalns asks: “Why would you go out of your way to find crime if your job is to increase the amount of traffic on your network?”

We should be angry about the persistence of scam calls, texts, and emails, because they’re a solvable problem that we shouldn’t have to live with. There’s no reason why the average person should expect to have to spend valuable time trying to figure out whether a caller is who they say they are. It’s easy to make excuses (the scams often originate in foreign countries, so prosecuting the callers is difficult), but because our communications are delivered through giant, profitable corporations, those corporations should have the responsibility to screen calls, texts, and emails to ensure that vulnerable people aren’t victimized. And if the federal government imposed harsh penalties on companies that let scammers through to consumers, you can bet that you’d see scams dry up very quickly. We are allowing a completely fixable problem to persist. 

Unfortunately, we live in an age where scams are increasingly normalized, as if fraud is a legitimate part of the free market. The president himself has a history of scamming people, from running a fake university to fleecing his followers with a personal cryptocurrency. There is a risk that people will just come to accept constant attempts to lie to them and steal their money as part of the natural order of things. This is, after all, the age of the bullshitter. 

But no one likes it, and I think a campaign to eliminate scams once and for all (you know, being “tough on crime”) would be a major political winner. I don’t really understand why more of an issue isn’t made of this. It’s a nonpartisan issue, a constant source of frustration, and  nearly everyone knows someone who has been swindled thanks to the failures of government and large corporations. A party that wants to build popular support should make a simple promise to the American people: we will keep you safe from the nefarious actors who want to manipulate you, lie to you, and take your life savings. Who wouldn’t vote for that?