By TIM CARPENTER
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Gullible Kansas consumers and the state’s elderly population repeatedly victimized by telephone scammers land on so-called sucker lists sold to unscrupulous marketers, charities and organizations willing to pay for leads on potential victims.
“We have some consumers who just keep getting scammed,” said Fran Oleen, state deputy attorney general for consumer affairs. “The ones that are really problematic and concerning to us are … from especially elderly consumers. A lot of them are lonely and alone, and we see romance scams a lot.”
The consumer division chief for Attorney General Kris Kobach, who was sworn into office in mid-January, said Monday during a Senate hearing one of the many challenges for investigators was the reality of robocall technology evolving more rapidly than laws governing those businesses.
“It’s like whack-a-mole. Soon as you get this one stopped they’re going to come up with a new one,” she said.
Sen. Rob Olson, an Olathe Republican who chairs the Senate Utilities Committee, said a personal legislative goal over the next couple years was to make Kansas among the top states in terms of deterring robocalls. He said state lawmakers could work in partnership with Kobach and perhaps incentivize telecommunications companies to engage more aggressively in the fight against robocall businesses.
“We want to be your partner and get to the bottom of this,” Olson told Oleen. “A lot of wasted time and a lot of fraud going on. We can’t eliminate it all, but let’s do what we can. Maybe they’ll stay away from Kansas if they know we’re serious.”
Oleen said the attorney general was eager to amend state law to push back against the robocall plague. She said the office of attorney general in Kansas eceived 231 robocall complaints from January 2022 to January 2023. Of that total, the office opened 68 investigations of potentially illegal robocalls. The attorney general didn’t file any lawsuits tied to those complaints last year, she said.
“To explain that, most of the investigative requests ended in ‘no jurisdiction’ or a finding of ‘no violation,'” she said.
However, she said the Federal Trade Commission received in 2022 about 29,000 robocall complaints from Kansans. She said the attorney general’s office would seek additional legal tools through the Legislature to initiate investigations of some of those FTC complaints.
Kansas joined an anti-robocall task force in July with 49 states and territories. Most, but not all, robocalls should be viewed as scams and a majority of robocalls originate overseas, she said.
Sen. Mike Thompson, R-Shawnee, suggested the attorney general’s office “stop the one guy in India named ‘Brad'” who appeared to be responsible for robocalls coming into Kansas.
“We have proof that a lot of them come from India,” Oleen said. “We have suspicions that some of them come from a couple other countries. We would propose possibly working with the Kansas Fusion Center to work on some intelligence to try and figure out if there was anything we could do on a federal level or state level.”
The Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center was established in 2009 as a joint endeavor between the attorney general’s office and the adjutant general’s department. The center’s mission is to generate intelligence analysis useful for homeland security policy and relevant threat warnings.
In response to inquiries from senators, Oleen said Kansas had trouble verifying senders of waves of political texts sent during the 2022 election cycle.
“Entities, which we had a hard time identifying, were sending texts supposedly on behalf of the candidate that the candidate did not endorse,” she said. “I personally got a couple of them.”