HBO's John Oliver Comes Up With Genius Plan To Stop Robocalls
April 21, 2020 | News | No Comments
There may be “only one thing that everyone in America agrees on right now,”says “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver. That one thing crosses party lines. It’s a shared annoyance with robocalls, says the HBO comedy host.
Robocalls invade our cellphones and land lines in at a breakneck pace. The Federal Communications Commission says Americans received about 50 billion of them last year, an increase of more than 57 percent, and robocalls are the topic of 60 percent of all complaints to the agency.
Some robocalls are legitimate, Oliver says, but “the vast majority of them can vary from the irritating to the outright illegal.”
Nothing short of cutting our telephonic umbilical cords seems to work, but as Oliver notes, we can’t go back to yelling at one another through cans connected by a string. People are discouraged the FCC has done nothing concrete to stop robocalls that try to trick them into giving away personal banking and financial information.
FCC Chairman Ajit Paj has the power to stop them, or at least “require telecom companies to offer free call-blocking services or implement something called call authentication, which could significantly curtail spoofing, but he hasn’t done that,” Oliver says.
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“Instead, what he’s done is ‘urge’ them to do that … If he had ‘required’ them to it that from the get-go, we might actually have those fixes by now.”
But Oliver has a plan to stop robocalls that we think is pretty genius. Programs to create robocalls can be created within about 15 minutes, and his team created one to call the five FCC commissioners and deliver a a special message from Oliver.
“Hi, FCC,” it says. “This is John from customer service. Congratulations! You’ve just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today. Sorry, but I am a live person. Robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you. Talk again in 90 minutes. Here’s some bagpipe music.”
Warning: The clip below of John Oliver’s plan to end robocalls contains coarse language inappropriate for young children and may be offensive to some viewers.
