Turn Victims Into Bounty Hunters

This is an update on a very simple and non-technical, idea that harkens back centuries: Enlist the aid of the citizenry to help support the efforts of law enforcement. In other words, pay bounties.

There would be a bounty on both robocaller services and their clients and, if you want to get really tough, add in as defendants both the primary and secondary communications carriers who provided the services which made the robocalls possible in the first place.

In other words, hit all these companies where it will hurt them the most: In their bank accounts. That should stop most robocallers in their tracks, and sooner, rather than later.

Pay the bounty to the first 10 victims (plus one more, drawn by lot) who turn in the violator through an online FTC complaint process. The ability to fight back goes far to re-empower people who have been victimized, but getting paid for it, too, puts icing on the cake and turns the victim into the winner. In today's economy, there will be no shortage of people eager to pick up even a little spare cash. For an ironic change, instead of resenting robocalls, most victims will actually hope for them and the chance that they represent to make some needed money.

In practice, each perpetrator would be fined something serious, say $50,000 for a first offense. The count would be one offense for each day that they run the campaign. Fines would double with each additional new campaign.

The twist here is that, instead of the fines being paid to the government, they'd be used to pay the bounties to the citizens.

The bounty reporting requirement would be that the bounty hunters would file a formal complaint via the FTC website. The requirements would include submitting the date and time of the call, the phone number to which the call was made, the phone number of the robocaller (assuming that it wasn't blocked) and the company/entity on whose behalf the robocall was made. The complaint would be formal and the complainants would agree to testify in court, if necessary.

10 complaints would be sufficient to trigger an FTC prelminary investigation, starting with the call records of the robocaller being cross-checked with complainant's receiving numbers (or vice versa). Even if a robocaller's number is blocked to the recipient, the carrier still has it, so it should be easy to correlate a list of 10 recipient numbers, with dates and times, with the outgoing calls made through the carrier and quickly pinpoint the robocaller.

This could probably be automated, along with automatically notifying the carrier to cease transmitting calls from that number(s) immediately, pending further investigation. I would cut a lot of slack to cooperative carriers and jump down hard on the uncooperative carriers.

I'd suggest that the bounty payout rate to the complainants should be along the following lines:

1. The first person to complain, as above, would receive 33% of the fine.
2. The second person would receive 17%
3. The next 8 complainants would each receive 5% ($2,500 at the $50,000/offense rate).
4. Another 5% would go to the first complainant who also provided a recording of the robocall sufficient to identify the beneficiary and to be used as evidence in court.
5. The final 5% would be paid to a randomly-drawn complainant from the list that formed after the first 10 complaints. That would make this a virtual lotto, but the player wouldn't have to pay cash for a ticket, just do their civic and social duty to end robocalling. Many people will spend 5 minutes for a chance to win $2,500. It would also help the FTC to determine the extent of the robocaller's activities and their range of operation.

This kind of multiple and sliding payout schedule would avoid deterring victims from not bothering to complain because it might seem likely that someone else had already done so. Lotto players are still happy if they win a smaller prize. But, the chance to earn the big bounty will also spur citizens into immediate action and, at worst, they'd still be entered in the lotto drawing.

The bounties should be paid directly out of the general funds, payable upon a guilty plea/verdict, not after the fines had finally been collected. Traditionally, the human criminal bounty hunters in the 1800's were paid upon delivery, not after the trial, so there's probably a good reason for this approach. Unlike the traditional approach, the bounties are paid by the perpetrator, not the taxpayers.

Having to wait for years will discourage complainants nearly as much as no bounty at all. Realistically, this is not going to be a serious cost to the taxpayers, since these stiff penalties will cut the incidence of robocalls dramatically, and that's the whole point. As the word of the high monetary risk gets out to these phone spammers, they'll find another business model.

From robocall to online complaint could take less than 5 minutes. If everything was automated and the public was aware, it could take be less than one hour from the first complaint to shutting down the robocaller's campaign, thereby sparing countless other victims.

Since robocallers can easily block their outgoing phone number, I would make this (blocking a number during the commission of a robocall) a felony, with additional criminal fines and penalties, that would not be shared, for the sake of administrative simplicity and to avoid such a precedent. If the number is blocked, the identity of the robocaller can be compelled from the beneficiary of the robocall campaign.

If I was a robocaller and this was the punitive risk that I was taking, I'd find another business to be in. With no more robocallers, there would be no more robocalls.

Much the same program would also deter live unsolicited sales call to numbers that are registered on the "do not call" list.