HARRISBURG — Attorney General Dave Sunday and 48 other attorneys general called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to strengthen rules that would cut off scammers’ access to legitimate telephone numbers.
Scammers often use real phone numbers for “spoofing” in efforts to appear legitimate when targeting people for robocalls. Last year, Americans received nearly 30 billion scam robocalls and text messages.
Attorney General Sunday is part of the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force that initially engaged with FCC in 2021 to combat robocalls and collaborate on the FCC’s proposed rules. The Office of Attorney General is a co-lead in the recent action, along with Colorado, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio.
“Robocalls are more than just a nuisance — they are often a means to perpetrate a scam, and when they involve legitimate phone number “spoofs,” they are more effective in achieving their mission of duping Pennsylvanians,” Attorney General Sunday said. “We are asking the feds to cut off scammers’ access to real phone numbers, which they often buy in droves.”
This is the latest action by Attorney General Sunday and the Office of Attorney General to shield Pennsylvanians from harmful communications. As part of the related and ongoing “Operation Robocall Roundup,” AG Sunday and the national coalition sent warning letters to major phone service providers to stop allowing illegal robocalls to reach consumers.
While most legitimate businesses use the same phone number for many years, scammers cycle through millions of brand new phone numbers, which helps them avoid detection by spam filters. In one North Carolina case, scammers made more than 17.3 million calls on a single day through one phone company – but they generally didn’t use the same number more than twice to make those calls, which is a common tactic among scammers.
Scammers used to primarily rely on illegal “spoofing” of other people’s phone numbers to make it look like a call was coming from a legitimate company or government agency. But scammers cannot easily do this anymore after the federal government and state attorneys general took action to cut down on illegal spoofing. Now, scammers often purchase legitimate phone numbers and use them to make robocalls.
In addition to the steps the FCC is already taking, the bipartisan attorneys general are asking the federal government to do more, including:
- Require every company that is authorized to purchase and then resell phone numbers in North America to meet stronger certification rules and share how and to whom they are assigning numbers.
- Require these companies to submit regular reports about the sale and use of numbers, so law enforcement can trace illegal robocalls back to the source. These reports will also help law enforcement hold all the companies in the call path accountable for selling or transmitting numbers used to conduct illegal robocalls.
- Require people and entities that are applying to access phone numbers to confirm that they won’t use them to make illegal robocalls.
- Block the sale of phone numbers to entities that aren’t tied to a calling or texting service. Robocallers often buy these numbers without linking them to a legitimate phone service, since they don’t plan on using the numbers for legitimate calling and texting purposes.
- Prohibit number cycling, which is when an entity buys lots of numbers and then uses them on a rotating, sometimes single-use basis to avoid being detected by tools that flag numbers used to make illegal robocalls.
- Restrict the offering of trial numbers to discourage scammers from taking advantage of them to harm consumers.
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