On the recordJanuary 12, 2017
Mr. President, fraudulent and abusive phone scams plague thousands of Americans each year. These deceitful practices cause serious financial harm to victims, and have even led to tragedy in a few cases. Both the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, where I serve as Ranking Member, and the Special Committee on Aging, where I previously served as Chairman, have explored the continuing severe impact of these scams. Consumers continue to lose millions of dollars each year to fraudulent phone scams, many of which originate from other countries. And the impacts of these scams are very real to the consumers who suffer. According to an October 2015 press report from CNN, one poor soul took his life earlier that year after being tricked into spending thousands of dollars in a vain attempt to collect on his winnings in the Jamaican lottery--winnings that were non- existent because it was all a scam perpetrated by phone-based fraudsters. Nearly all of us have trained ourselves to ignore phone calls and text messages from numbers that are not familiar to us. But these sophisticated scammers know that--and have changed their tactics. Scammers today impersonate government institutions, promote fraudulent lottery schemes, and tailor their calls to individuals in order to coerce victims into paying large sums of money.…





