phone – Memphis Flyer

Ronnie Wu | Dreamstime.com

More than 48 billion robocalls were made last year and Attorneys General from across the country urged the U.S. Senate last week to help stop them.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery joined 54 other Attorneys General in a letter urging lawmakers to enact the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act. The legislation would curb illegal robocalls and phone spoofing, in which consumers are tricked into answering calls because the incoming number appears to be local.

“The state AGs are on the front lines of enforcing do-not-call laws and helping consumers who are harassed and scammed by unwanted telemarketing calls and robocalls,” reads the letter. “Robocalls and telemarketing calls are currently the number one source of consumer complaints at many of our offices, as well as at both the (Federal Communications Commission) and the (Federal Trade Commission).”

Consumers reported losses of more than $290 million thank to fraudulent telemarketers, according to the letter. Consumers Union reported telemarketing scams have been a $9.5 billion out to the U.S. economy.

Robocalls were expected to rise 33 percent in 2018. The actual number — almost 48 billion calls — was up 36 percent over 2017.

The TRACED Act would allow states, federal regulators, and telecom providers to take steps to combat robocalls. The legislation would require voice service providers to participate in a call authentication framework to help block unwanted calls.

As reported by Douglas Martin in The New York Times on August 20th, Josef Carl Engressia Jr., aka Joybubbles, made a name for himself in the 1960s when he discovered that he could make free phone calls anywhere in the world by simply whistling the proper sounds into what was then a tone-based national phone system. He and others — including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — turned that talent into a game. They became “phone phreaks,” precursors of what we know today as computer hackers.

But in the ’70s, Engressia got caught. He had moved to Memphis in 1971, where he was eventually convicted of phone fraud. From Memphis, he moved to Denver and then to Minneapolis, where he built a network of fellow phone enthusiasts. He survived on Social Security disability, but he did take part-time jobs. Engressia’s superb sense of smell, for example, led agricultural researchers to use him in their efforts to control the odor of hog excrement.

Throughout his life, Engressia clung to childhood. As Martin reports in the Times, he made himself minister in what Engressia called the Church of Eternal Childhood. He owned tapes of every episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, He collected teddy bears. His I.Q. was 172. The cause of his death remains unknown.