The Federal Communications Commission is moving to crack down on illegal robocalls and the use of foreign call centers.
At a meeting Thursday, the three-member commission unanimously approved a new proposed regulation to increase certification and disclosure requirements for obtaining phone numbers, while also expanding those same requirements to all providers seeking phone numbers from the North American Numbering Plan Administrator and resellers.
The rule – which will be shaped through public comments – is meant to make it more difficult for spammers, scammers and other illegal robocallers to obtain legitimate phone numbers. The FCC’s Office of Communications said a majority of the agency’s investigations into illegal robocalling have involved resold numbers.
It would also impose stricter disclosure requirements on telecoms about the callers on their networks and their identities, information that will assist organizations like the Industry Traceback Group track and identify robocallers as their calls hop across the nation’s patchwork, decentralized telephone networks.
Commissioner Anna Gomez said the proposed rules would help raise the bar for bad actors to obtain valid phone numbers and help close gaps in reporting that make it harder for industry and regulators to find and expunge robocallers from networks.
“Right now, bad actors are exploiting gaps in a phone number system that was designed for a simpler time,” Gomez said.
The commission plans to explore a range of solutions to strengthen numbering requirements and policies, including cracking down on common tactics that rely heavily on resold numbers — like number cycling where “service providers churn through large quantities of telephone numbers [on] a rotating and even single-use basis to evade detection.”
Commissioner Olivia Trusty said that while changes in technology and the marketplace have brought significant benefits to consumers, it has also “made it more difficult to identify who is using telephone numbers and for what purposes, complicating both robocall enforcement and numbering administration.”
Last month, the FCC finalized regulations that require telecoms to annually certify that their caller information is accurate and provide updated information to the agency’s Robocall Mitigation Database.
A separate proposed regulation passed by the commission Thursday would place new restrictions on the ability of U.S. telephone providers to outsource their call-center services to foreign countries. It specifically asks about the feasibility of giving consumers the option to require that their calls be routed to U.S.-based call centers, requiring calls involving “certain types of sensitive information” to be processed at U.S. locations, requiring providers to disclose the use of overseas centers to callers during a call and requiring operators to speak proficient English.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr touted the initiative as part of the Trump administration’s stated efforts to convince American companies to onshore more of their services in the U.S.
But organizations like the AARP have also found that overseas call centers operating outside of U.S. or international law play a big role in the nation’s robocalling epidemic. In a press conference after the meeting, Carr echoed that sentiment, claiming that some criminal scammers plaguing Americans today first broke into the industry by working at outsourced call centers.
“I think it also helps us crack down on some of the illegal robocallers,” Carr said about the new onshoring rules. “At the end of the day, I think American callers should expect and deserve to reach American call centers.”
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Two measures aim to make it harder for robocallers to obtain valid U.S. phone numbers and pressure companies to onshore call center services.
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