> "We have a strong robocalling enforcement program"
...and literally could not make it further. The FTC may have legal or technological problems not of their making, and by some arcane measure may have a "strong" enforcement program, but whatever they are doing is by no means effective.
"You all have no real way of forcing us to do more currently, so we are going to avoid making a blunder and simply we will say we are super commited to the idea that we are having literally any effect at all"
There are no robocalls in Germany, where I reside. It’s a completely non-existing problem. And the FTC would have all the power to stop this right now instead of complaining about it.
If you don‘t believe me, look at what the CAN-SPAM act did to corporate communication (worldwide).
It‘s as easy as slapping a 10.000$ fine on every single robocall that‘s either made by a participant or relayed through an operator network. Problem solved in days.
But hey, it‘s „good for business“ (while probably bad for overall GDP), that explanation seems to always work to keep Americans at bay.
Those people spend a certain amount of money via the legalized bribery of campaign contributions to ensure that the government remains incompetent at tasks like reining in robocalls.
The UK has a law that says you mustn't call people who don't want calls. Obviously "Never call me again" makes that clear the first time, but there's a (marketing industry operated but government regulated) scheme called the Telephone Preference Service (tpsonline.org.uk) to let you say you don't want unsolicited calls from anybody. They don't really advertise it (why would they) but they are obliged to operate it or else the government will make up its own rules that would presumably be far tougher, like maybe "Nobody wants these bloody calls, knock it off".
Obviously there are still straight up _crooks_ but the thing about such a Do No Call list is it's also full of people who _hate_ telemarketers. When I was a student (~20 years ago) we had a pinned up script for timewasting telemarketers. We could waste five, ten, fifteen minutes of their time and they were never going to make a sale. And their calls were illegal anyway, so now they're losing money on a crime and when we hang up they're getting reported for the call on top of wasting all that time. So the effect is it's not very profitable AND it's illegal.
I haven't had a robocall in maybe a decade.
Pretty sure cycling through every number would get you dropped by anybody in that business. In terms of flagging yourself for attention it's like you spray-painted "Crack for sale here, no cops please" on the side of your drug warehouse. Dialling random numbers will have way too high a ratio of uncompleted calls versus anyone with an actual list of actual contacts, it would take a phone company IT person ten seconds to find out which of their customers is doing that and "suggest" they go elsewhere.
Much more likely they work from a "sucker list" vetted to weed out people like my 20-year old housemates last century who will just lose you money. That would explain nobody I know getting calls. So, I guess maybe you're just unlucky? No more help here I'm afraid -shrug-
This mindset is evident even here on HN where, for example, "Move fast and break things" is an accepted item of conventional wisdom. Moving fast and breaking things are not good in and of themselves, they are good because if you move fast and break things you can make more money than people who move more deliberately and don't break things. (Until, that is, your airplanes start to fall out of the sky.)
That's the reason that the U.S. government won't move against robocallers: they are making money, so ipso facto they must be doing something right. If you move against the robocallers, that's the beginning of a slippery slope to questioning the idea that money is the ultimate quality metric, and that will completely undermine the foundation (such as it is) of the current power structure.
It's ironic how popular prosperity theology is with American Evangelicals.
This is the problem with theocracy: you can find a scripture to justify just about anything.
But flaunting wealth and saying your acumen caused it turns out to be effective all over the world because people want it. A lot - most - wealthy people dont even know they have enough money to have a decadent lifestyle and dont know where to start. Most are not consciously avoiding something flashy but are also constrained by their peers from being accepted for doing anything different.
So there is still a lust for people that can attract attention based on their perceived wealth.