By TALI ARBEL AP Technology Writer, and staff
COLUMBUS — Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and his counterparts in the rest of the nation have reached an agreement with a dozen major cell phone companies to fight robocalls that plague Americans.
It’s the latest step from government and industry to combat the growing problem and parts of the agreement echo steps already taken by regulators and Congress, which is working on anti-robocall bills.
“This agreement brings phone service providers on board as critical allies in our fight against illegal robocalls. By adopting these commonsense business practices, service providers will reinforce our ongoing efforts to crack down on this growing nuisance,” Yost said
Americans get nearly 5 billion automated calls from scammers, telemarketers, debt collectors and others every month.
According to the agreement, the companies will offer call-blocking tools for free to customers, with the exception of those who still use old copper landline phones (where it’s more difficult from a technical standpoint). Many of the major companies already offer this, although some charge for some or all of the services.
The companies will also block calls for everyone at the network level, landlines included.
The Federal Communications Commission has called on phone companies to block unwanted calls and expects carriers not to charge.
The agreement also asks the carriers to deploy a system that can label caller ID numbers as real. Scammers often use faked numbers to get people to pick up. The FCC already has asked for such a system, and companies have started rolling it out.
The state AGs also asks the companies to “dedicate sufficient resources” to quickly figure out where illegal robocalls are coming from when asked by law enforcement or by an existing industry group that is dedicated to tracing the origin of scam calls.
Going forward, the phone companies will stay in close communication with the coalition of attorneys general to ensure that robocall protections develop as technology and scam tactics change.
The companies have also pledged to knowing who their customers are so bad actors can be identified and investigated, working with law enforcement, including attorneys general, to trace the origins of illegal robocalls and requiring phone companies with which they contract to cooperate and trace back identification.
There’s no timeline, though, for the companies in the pact to fulfill the promises announced Thursday by Yost and attorneys general from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The telecom companies involved are AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated Communications, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon and Windstream. Not included are Altice and Cox, cable companies with millions of customers, as well as many small rural telecoms.