Republican strategist says FCC needs to hold fraudulent callers more accountable

Republican strategist Harlan Hill called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to hold telemarketers more accountable after a report about how spam are calls on the rise.

Hill, who is the president of the Logan Circle Group, said while he runs automated calls for political campaigns, the volume of incoming calls from scammers has gotten out of control.

Hill said there are already laws against these kinds of practices, but the FCC isn’t enforcing them.

“There are laws on the books that people are already not following, there’s got to be an enforcement arm of the FCC to start targeting these groups and holding them accountable, fining them,” Hill told Hill.TV co-hosts Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”

Will Jawando, a Democratic nominee for Montgomery County Council in Maryland, agreed, emphasizing that the barrage of fraudulent calls is especially problematic for immigrant communities, which are often targets for scammers.

“They’re going into immigrant communities and targeting Latinos and Asian-Americans with deceptive practices based on the travel ban, immigration and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids and getting people to lose their life savings, so it’s not only just annoying — it’s really hurting people,” Jawando said.

These comments come after First Orion published a report, which found that nearly half of all cellphone calls next year will come from scammers

The caller ID and call blocking services company said that the volume of mobile scam calls has jumped from 3.7 percent of total calls in 2017 to almost 30 percent in 2018.

That number is expected to reach more than 44 percent by early 2019.

— Tess Bonn