American consumers to continue to receive extraordinarily high volumes of unwanted and illegal robocalls. Youmail estimated that nationwide robocalls in the month of May 2022 totaled 4 billion.
The FCC has recently announced the latest steps that it has taken to address the problem:
- On May 19, the Commission announced that nine state attorneys general have joined the agency's existing agreement with a majority of states "to share evidence, coordinate investigations, pool enforcement resources, and work together to combat illegal robocall campaigns and protect American consumers from scams." (The Commission's partnership with other states was the subject of an April 2022 blog post).
- On May 20, the Commission released an order in which it places new obligations on gateway providers that are the entry point for calls to the U.S. that originate from foreign countries. The requires gateway providers to: (1) "develop and submit traffic mitigation plans to the Robocall Mitigation Database" (2) "apply STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication to all unauthenticated foreign-originated Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) calls with U.S. North American Numbering Plan (NANP) numbers"; and (3) "respond to traceback requests in 24 hours, block calls where it is clear they are conduits for illegal traffic, and implement 'know your upstream provider' obligations."
- On June 6, Chairwoman Rosenworcel signed a Memorandum of Understanding on combatting robocalls with the top Canadian government agency official for telecommunications.
It is widely known that majority of unwanted robocalls to American consumers originate from outside the U.S. Hopefully, these actions taken by the FCC will help reduce the mass number of illegal robocalls and ID-spoofing scams that target consumers.
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