WASHINGTON, December 20, 2023 – The Federal Communications Commission issued a cease and desist on Wednesday to two companies accused of facilitating illegal robocalls.

The companies, Solid Double and CallWin, are required to block traffic from certain callers identified by the commission’s Enforcement Bureau as bad actors and report those efforts to the FCC in the next two days. Both will also have to detail plans to prevent future robocalls to the commission within 14 days.

“Providers that allow illegal traffic face serious consequences,” FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said in a statement. “We will not hesitate to take decisive action to protect consumers.”

The FCC has indeed taken an aggressive stance on scam calls and text in recent months. In August the commission expanded its STIR/SHAKEN regime, a protocol for verifying caller identities, to all providers handling call traffic and moved in October to blacklist 20 providers for lax robocall prevention policies.

Commissioners also adopted rules at their December open meeting that place more stringent consent requirements on companies looking to send automated calls and texts to customers.

In this case, Solid Double is accused of facilitating spoofed traffic – calls purporting to be from a different number than is actually placing the call – from at least one entity and potentially others, including one the FCC said it identified by the name of “Sham Telecom.”

The business whose number was being used by spoofers alerted the FCC through a spoof reporting portal after receiving calls from targeted consumers, making Solid Double the first provider on the receiving end of an enforcement action initiated by the portal.

As for CallWin, the company is accused of originating robocall campaigns from at least four entities that did not obtain consent from the consumers they targeted.

The commission said in a statement that Solid Double and CallWin could have all their traffic blacklisted if the two providers do not comply with the order. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Commissioners asked Congress to take action to further strengthen the agency’s robocall authorities at a House oversight hearing on December 1, including widening the scope of technologies covered by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and giving the FCC the ability to collect fines from illegal robocallers.

NEW YORK, December 12, 2023 –  Spam caller notifications should still include the information of the caller to ensure that important calls are not missed, according to industry players. 

Illegal robocalls are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission through a framework called STIR/SHAKEN, which requires service providers to authenticate calls before they reach a consumer to combat spam and scam calls. 

Ron Thorton, consulting engineer at IT service company United Office, said at the VON Evolution conference last month that calls are often determined to be spam by third party analytics companies based on calling patterns, such as the number of and duration of those calls to decide if a number presents as spam. 

A problem with tagging those calls as spam is that any previous caller identification an individual receives is replaced with a warning label which deters them from picking up the phone and nothing else, said Thorton. 

Those calls, unfortunately, could include ones originating from the doctor’s office or a bank because they have persistent calling patterns that could be labeled as spam. 

Concern about users missing important calls that become tagged as spam has been brought forth in the past by industry experts who felt that intermediate phone operators determining whether or not a call is fit to go through, was problematic.  

“You aren’t giving me all of the information to make my own judgment on this call because you’re basically telling me to ignore it,” added Thornton.  

Jeff Pulver, the founder of VON Evolution, said that this kind of problem erodes the trust people have in the phone calls they get. 

To put autonomy back into consumers hands, Thornton said that going forward, terminating carriers should not entirely replace the caller identification that people receive. 

Thornton explained that terminating carriers should then not be allowed to replace the name of a caller. “If you’re going to put out a potential spam tag…you’ve got to include any name that you can potentially access.”

He added that this kind of oversight may have to come directly from the FCC in the form of caller label regulatory guidelines and should be prompted by complaints from users receiving incorrect calls. 

The caveat he added was that oftentimes the sheer number of trusted callers who are tagged as spam is not properly recorded because people are not picking up those calls in the first place. 

Thornton said that those “calls aren’t picked up so nobody knows the reason it wasn’t picked up is because it was tagged as potential spam.”

To remedy that gap in spam caller information, there needs to be a kind of feedback loop from the terminating provider to the originating provider so that when trusted calls are tagged as spam, people are made aware of it. 

Glenn Richards, partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, who spoke at the VON event, previously told Broadband Breakfast that the responsibility of blocking spam calls belongs to the originating service provider and that they should be subject to enforcement. 

At VON, Richards explained that when it comes to robocall enforcement, there is a fine line between stopping fraudulent calls and stopping legitimate calls that need to be answered – a line industry experts were trying to parse out at the event. 

More recently, government figureheads have been calling on the FCC to better their enforcement of robocalls by putting money into enforcement offices or more stringent robocall investigations. 

At its November meeting, the FCC voted to start implementing the use of AI to be able to better detect robocalls and, in October, issued enforcement orders and blocked traffic from nearly 20 providers for having lax robocall regulations.

WASHINGTON, December 1, 2023 – All five Federal Communications Commissioners took part in a lengthy and at times contentious House oversight hearing on Thursday.

Commissioners urged Congress to restore the FCC’s authority to action spectrum, which expired in March and left the nation’s airwaves in limbo, and to fund the Affordable Connectivity Program, the low-income internet subsidy set to dry up in April of next year. 

GOP lawmakers FCC Republicans also took the chance to slam efforts by the commission’s Democratic majority.

The discussion touched on other issues including robocall prevention, rip and replace funding, and pole attachments.

Robocalls

The commission has been taking action on preventing robocalls this year, kicking off an inquiry into using artificial intelligence to detect fraud, blocking call traffic from 20 providers for lax enforcement policies and issuing hundreds of millions in fines. In August the commission also expanded the STIR/SHAKEN regime – a set of measures to confirm caller identities – to all providers who handle call traffic.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel asked multiple times for three Congressional actions she said would help the commission crack down on scam calls: a new definition for “autodialer,” the ability to collect fines, and access to Bank Secrecy Act information.

The Supreme Court limited the definition of autodialers in 2021 to devices that store or produce phone numbers with random or sequential number generators. That leaves the scope of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which guides the FCC’s authority, “stuck in the nineties,” according to Rosenworcel.

“A lot of scam artists are using technologies no longer covered” by the act, she said. “We can’t go after them.”

On collecting robocall fines, that authority currently rests with the Department of Justice, and Rosenworcel is not the first to tell Congress the agency’s enforcement has been lax. Industry groups at an October Senate hearing cited slow DOJ action as a major reason FCC fines on the issue often go uncollected.

The Bank Secrecy Act requires financial institutions to keep records on certain transactions to help law enforcement agencies track money laundering and other criminal activity. The FCC cannot access information governed by the act, which Rosenworcel said would help the commission go after repeat scammers.

“These scam artists set up one company, we shut them down, they go and set another one up,” she said.

Rip and replace

Commissioners urged Congress to fund the rip and replace program. Congress allocated $1.9 billion to reimburse broadband companies for replacing network equipment from Chinese companies deemed to be national security threats, mainly Huawei and ZTE.

The FCC was tasked with overseeing the program and found in 2022 that another $3 billion would be needed to get the work done. The Biden administration joined a chorus of lawmakers and broadband companies in calling for Congress to fill the gap, but legislation on the issue has yet to be passed.

“We’re providing 40 cents on the dollar to a lot of small and rural carriers,” said Rosenworcel. “They need more funds to get the job done.”

The commission has been granting extensions to providers unable to get the work done on time. In addition to supply chain issues, some small providers cite a lack of funding as the reason they’re unable to replace insecure equipment.

Pole attachments

Commissioners expressed a willingness to shift some of the burden of utility pole replacements off of broadband providers as they attach new equipment.

“If a pole is getting replaced,” Commissioner Brendan Carr said, “there’s probably a role for the FCC to say that the pole owner should bear somewhere north of the cost of $0.”

The commission has authority in 26 states over most pole attachment deals between utility pole owners and telecommunications companies looking to expand their networks. The issue of who pays for poles that need to be replaced to accommodate more communications equipment is contentious, with telecoms arguing utilities force them to pay for replacing already junk poles. 

After spending years sifting through thousands of comments, commissioners have apparently been persuaded. Rules up for a vote at the commission’s December meeting would limit the scenarios in which utilities could pass full replacement costs on to attachers.

Broadband funding map

Rosenworcel repeatedly asked lawmakers to work with the commission on ensuring its broadband funding map is kept up to date.

The FCC launched its funding map in May to keep track of the myriad federal broadband subsidy efforts and avoid funding the same areas multiple times. The Department of Agriculture, the FCC, and the Treasury Department each oversee separate broadband funding programs, in addition to the Commerce Department’s upcoming $42.5 billion broadband expansion effort.

The commission has signed memoranda of understanding with those agencies on providing data for the funding map, but Rosenworcel asked the subcommittee for help ensuring the agencies follow through and respond to FCC requests for their funding data. 

“If you could help us make sure those other agencies respond to us with data, you’ll see where there are problems, duplication, areas we haven’t reached,” she said.