Fed up with unwanted phone calls at home, Long Beach resident Lynne Clarke registered her landline on the national “Do Not Call” list roughly a decade ago.

It didn’t work. The deluge of unsolicited calls from telemarketers has only grown worse. Voices purporting to be carpet cleaners, repairmen, housekeepers – even IRS agents – ring her line an average of 10 times a day.

Sound familiar?

Clarke is far from alone. Thirteen years after the launch of the Do Not Call list, exasperated federal regulators are applying pressure on major phone carriers and tech companies to come up with ways to rein in the worsening volume of robocalls. Combined, telemarketing calls and robocalls – prerecorded sales messages delivered by computerized autodialers – are now the No. 1 complaint that the Federal Communications Commission receives from the public.

In fiscal 2015, residents in the 714, 949 and 562 area codes filed nearly 70,000 complaints over violations of the federal Do Not Call rule – more than double the total five years ago, data show.

In a time when spam email is actually falling (mainly due to technological advances), junk phone calls continue to be a nuisance and, often, a crime.

‘SCOURGE’

Consumers Union, an advocacy group, estimates phone fraud led to $350 million in financial losses in 2011, the most recent figure available. Nationwide, taxpayers who reported being victimized by scammers masquerading as IRS officials lost more than $31 million from October 2013 to March of this year, federal figures show.

Victims often are elderly. The Federal Trade Commission found that 80 percent of some telemarketing scams target people 65 and older. Various studies have shown that seniors are often targeted because they are more likely to pick up the phone, engage in conversation and be worried about their financial future.

And today’s phone schemes are becoming increasingly pervasive and sophisticated.

Improved technology and cheaper, easier-to-make international phone calls placed over internet lines have allowed scammers to broaden their reach and mask their identities and locations.

One recent tactic involves deploying technology that sends voicemail messages into inboxes without allowing the call recipient to decline.

The widespread phone-scam issue – which experts partly link to a lack of innovation and cooperation from U.S. phone carriers – prompted FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to convene a task force in August comprising 30 telecommunications and technology firms including AT&T, Verizon, Google and Apple. Their report with ideas for fighting robocallers is due Oct. 19.

“This scourge must stop,” said Wheeler at the first task force meeting.

PHONE WHACK-A-MOLE

Maureen Mahoney, a policy analyst at Consumers Union, is pleased with the first step but says it remains to be seen if the group can produce real, meaningful solutions.

So far, AT&T has made general commitments to the cause, such as complying with “emerging … caller ID verification standards” once they’re available, and investigating and adopting global phone system solutions tied to web-based phone calls “where viable,” according to ideas outlined in an AT&T public policy blog post. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson chairs the robocalling task force.

Mahoney says such promises are “rather vague … allowing them a lot of leeway.”

In the past, telecommunications companies have said they lack the technology and authority to crack down on nuisance calls. Last year, at the urging of several state attorneys general, federal regulators tried to clear up any confusion, saying phone companies not only have the legal authority to offer call-blocking tools, they’re also encouraged to do so.

CTIA, a trade group that represents AT&T, Verizon and other U.S. wireless communications players, did not respond to requests for comment.

However, 2015 comments from the trade group to the FCC warn the commission about “unintended consequences” and “significant logistical and technical challenges” that may arise from blocking calls.

The comments, penned by CTIA leadership, also say mandating phone carriers to decide which phone numbers should be blocked or let through could result in the blocking of calls that customers would have wanted to receive.

The wireless industry group also noted that the task of identifying robocallers today has become increasingly difficult with the use of phone “spoofing” – the practice of falsifying the data transmitted through caller ID to disguise one’s identity. If one number is blocked, scammers can easily and cheaply purchase another.

CTIA argues the fleeting nature of today’s robocallers makes maintaining call-block lists “a massive undertaking,” adding “the utility of this effort would be easily negated by the use of number spoofing.”

FIGHTING BACK

It’s been more than a year since federal regulators have made clear that phone companies can and should offer customers robocall-blocking tools. So far, Time Warner Cable is the only major telecommunications company that has taken steps to do that, said Mahoney, of Consumers Union.

Time Warner directly offers its customers a third-party service called Nomorobo, among the startups trying to fill the robocall-blocking demand left by the major phone carriers. With one click, those customers can turn on the free service.

How it works: After a user activates Nomorobo, when a call is received, the company’s server checks to see whether it’s a known robocaller.

If it is, then the service answers and your phone will typically stop ringing after one ring. The intent is to let legitimate calls go through.

The brains behind the operation is founder and self-described serial entrepreneur Aaron Foss, who developed the idea in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s first robocall challenge to build a call-blocking service. The startup claims to have stopped more than 143 million calls for 675,000 users nationwide.

The service is free for landlines but is only available on Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, carriers. Foss said an iPhone version is in the works, to be priced at $1.99 a month.

“I really pushed the issue” of developing call-block technology, Foss said. “The carriers were not being truthful when they said it can’t be done. … We can block calls.”

Clarke, the Long Beach resident, installed Nomorobo about a year ago and says she is a fan of its easy setup and effectiveness in blocking unwanted calls.

“Occasionally one slips through,” said Clarke, a retiree.

Andrew Wilson, a stay-at-home dad in Fountain Valley, says ever since he began using Nomorobo six months ago, “practically no unwanted calls get through.”

Wilson found it strange his phone service provider, Time Warner, did not actively advertise Nomorobo on customer bills or elsewhere. He said he found out about the call-filtering service only while he was on Time Warner’s website to add telemarketing numbers on his call-block list.

“Why aren’t they advertising this?” Wilson said.

Mahoney, of Consumers Union, says more carriers should either develop their own call-blocking technology or offer third-party services like Nomorobo directly to their customers.

“What we don’t want is to have consumers track down third-party apps themselves,” she said. “The phone companies should offer them.”

U.S. phone carriers could also try to mimic Primus Canada, an independent internet and phone provider, Mahoney said. Since 2007, the company has offered its customers a free call-filtering service that spots suspicious calling patterns and screens unwanted calls through a system that “harnesses user feedback,” a 2015 report from Consumers Union states.

A NEW LIST?

Consumers Union, the advocacy group, has also recommended the development of a “Do Not Originate” list, an idea from Henning Schulzrinne, who was recently appointed the FCC’s senior adviser for technology.

The list would allow commonly spoofed entities such as the IRS and banks to register their outbound numbers in a database. Calls from those numbers “originating from certain providers or gateways” would raise red flags and likely be blocked, according to Consumers Union. The consumer watchdog group says phone carriers have the tools to execute something like this.

Huahong Tu, a robocall researcher and doctoral student at Arizona State University, said such a list sounds like a great short-term solution, but he sees some potential hurdles. A Do Not Originate list, he says, would also require all the carriers to work together to figure out where each caller ID should originate.

“It seems like we are going back to the idea of creating more lists, that creates more administrative and compliance headaches for the telephone companies,” Tu said. “It doesn’t fit the future trend of democratizing telephone carriers. Only one bad apple is needed to circumvent the list.”

He added that services such as Nomorobo may not be good long-term solutions because their systems won’t be able to keep up with spoofers.

Tu says the solution lies in bolstering phone verification. Internet browsers, he said, must verify the identities of websites typically with a green lock icon next to web addresses to ensure their authenticity. There’s no equivalent process for phone lines, which makes spoofing possible in the first place, he added.

Tu and his team at ASU filed a provisional patent outlining such a process, but he acknowledges that bringing something like this to life would require either consensus in the telecommunications community to accept such a standard or the creation of a commercial product.

The team is pursuing both paths.

With phone lines, “there’s a lack of accountability,” Tu said.

Contact the writer: lleung@scng.com