Roger Goldblatt, a deputy bureau chief with the FCC, visited the Twin Cities Senior Center on Wednesday as part of a weeklong circuit through Washington and Oregon.
Stories about senior citizens who fall for telephone scams, threatening letters and malevolent billing practices are a dime a dozen.
Scammers often target older members of society with specific claims such as an ailing grandchild or outstanding medical bill, hoping to extract a credit card or social security number before anyone gets wise. The relentless deluge of robocall after robocall can make filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission feel like screaming into the wind.
Roger Goldblatt, Deputy Bureau Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs arm of the FCC, heard the concerns of about 100 Lewis County residents firsthand Wednesday as he and two additional FCC officials held court for more than an hour at the Twin Cities Senior Center in Chehalis.
The trio are in the midst of a weeklong tour through Washington and Oregon focused on connecting with rural areas, a practice the agency is likely to expand over the next couple of years.
“We’ve had this concept for a while, where we go out to get feedback in person and relay important information back to policymakers in Washington D.C.,” Goldblatt said. “People back home are asking us if it’s been successful, and it has. People see that we’re real people, we get those scam calls too, and we can help cut red tape to get things done.”
Senior Citizens turned out en masse to ask about a wide variety of topics including rural broadband access, protecting personal information while using a cell phone and how to quickly find out if a seemingly urgent call is legitimate.
One woman said she’s taken to letting every call go to voicemail so she can screen them, but that sometimes it takes hours for the messages to show up on her phone when she’s at her rural home.
Another mentioned that she uses a phone designed for those with hearing problems that records every call to play it back at a high volume, including those trying to sell her a knee brace she didn’t need.
“A universal theme at all our stops has been frustration with those robocalls,” Goldblatt said. “That’s a problem that cuts across age, background, location and profession.”
Every senior citizen in attendance received a packet of information about how to avoid being scammed and how to protect themselves if they fear they’ve been taken advantage of.
It also included details about a planned change to television airwaves that will require people who watch channels over the air — not using a cable or satellite provider — to rescan their TV either late next year or early in 2020.
More than one person asked technical questions about the changes to frequencies that were brought on by the reverse auction of nearly 1,000 broadcast licenses. Goldblatt said he may consider lining up an engineer to field those queries the next time the FCC visits rural portions of the country.
“We’re learning things as we go on this pilot trip,” Goldblatt said. “Things like how to publicize where we’ll be and what people want to know. We’re planning on doing at least several more, and we don’t want it to be a short-lived venture. We want people to be happy we came out to meet with them.”
