LAS VEGAS, January 10, 2024 – Members of the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission emphasized the need for industry and government entities to collaborate in combating scam calls and texts at CES on Tuesday.

“Collaboration is key here,” said Amanda Potter, assistant vice president and senior legal counsel for AT&T.

Current measures

Alejandro Roark, chief of the FCC’s Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau, noted Federal Trade Commission data showing American consumers reported losing $790 million to scam calls and another $396 million to scam texts in 2022.

The Commission took action on preventing both in 2023, expanding its STIR/SHAKEN regime – a set of measures to confirm caller identities – to all providers who handle call traffic, moving to block call traffic from non compliant providers, and issuing multiple fines in the hundreds of millions. Almost every state has entered an agreement with the agency to collaborate on robocall investigations.

In addition, the FCC adopted its first robotext rules and moved to tighten those rules in December, closing the “lead generator loophole” by requiring affirmative consent for companies to send consumers marketing messages. Comments are being accepted on a proposal to institute a text authentication scheme.

For AT&T’s part, Potter said the company has instituted network filters to block messages that are likely to be illegal.

“We’re not going to claim success by any means, but when we have these robust network defenses, that does a lot,” she said, citing a total of 1 billion blocked texts on the company’s networks in July 2023.

AT&T also worked with manufacturers on features allowing consumers to report text as junk when deleting messages, which Potter said has provided extra data to tune spam filters.

What’s next

“We start from a standpoint of maximum flexibility when it comes to messaging,” Potter said, in contrast to voice calls, which are more tightly regulated and required FCC intervention for providers to block. 

“I’m concerned about that being taken away, or perhaps regulation being something of a distraction,” she said.

Roark agreed on flexibility being superior to regulation, although the Commission is moving forward with its proceeding on more expansive text authentication rules. The proposed rules include requiring more providers on the traffic chain to block texts from numbers flagged as scammers by the FCC and requiring measurers to verify the identity of texters, similar to the STIR/SHAKEN system for caller authentication.

The FCC is also taking comments on how AI factors into robocalls and robotexts, both how it’s used to perpetrate them and how the Commission might use AI tools to combat them.

At a House oversight hearing in November, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel asked Congress for the authority to collect the fines the Commission imposes – a job currently left to the DOJ – and access to more financial information to help the agency’s robocall prevention efforts.

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.