By Nolan Brey
KU Statehouse Wire Service
TOPEKA — Kansas lawmakers are considering a bill that would ban malicious caller-ID spoofing — the act of imitating a phone number that is not yours with the intent to mislead, defraud, or harass the recipient.
HB 2620 would make the act of spoofing, or possession of spoofing technology, illegal and could result in a fine of up to $10,000 per violation.
“If there’s some way out there to prevent this from happening, or at least scale it down, then I think it would be much appreciated by the citizens of the state of Kansas,” Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said.
Easter testified in favor of the bill during a House Committee on Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications hearing Tuesday morning.
He said he, too, has received scam calls with spoofed caller ID, and he said it’s time for the Legislature to take action against spoofing.
Spoofed calls often include familiar area codes to feign legitimacy. The Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office investigates several of these cases a year, many of them targeting vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, Easter said.
Domestic abusers also use spoofing technology to harass their victims by calling them from different numbers, Easter said, making them nearly impossible to trace.
However, even if the bill is passed, it would likely not make a major difference in fighting robocalls and spoofed calls in Kansas due to the sheer volume of calls, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said in his testimony to the committee.
Americans received an estimated 58 billion robocalls in 2019, Schmidt said.
“If you give us the authority, we’ll use it to the extent we can,” Schmidt said. “It’s probably not going to make a huge difference in actual behavior on the ground simply because of volume.”
In most cases, these malicious callers are already in violation of state and federal laws, Schmidt said.
Moreover, it is difficult to hold guilty parties accountable because robocall centers are often located outside of the U.S., where Kansas and the federal government have no jurisdiction to stop them, Schmidt said.
“You got to be able to find them to sue them or prosecute them,” Schmidt said.
For this reason, Schmidt said it’s important that Kansas work with the federal government and other entities to improve policy and technology to halt the calls that way.
“Advances in technology allow these calls to become virtually free and unlimited in volume from anywhere in the world and anywhere in Kansas,” Schmidt said. “And if it’s a technology-enabled problem, it’s got to be a technology-resolved problem.”
Representatives of Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile submitted written neutral testimony on the bill.
However, they said that federal legislation would be the most effective way to combat robo caller problems. State legislation would be unnecessarily piecemeal and redundant, especially in light of the new federal TRACED law that fights against spam callers, they said.
Rep. Joe Seiwert, R-Pretty Prairie, chairman of the committee, said they will likely work the bill later this week.
Nolan Brey is a University of Kansas senior from Sabetha majoring in journalism. The Eudora Times is running stories from the KU Statehouse Reporting class this semester. Reach us at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
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