As the 2024 US Presidential Election approached, political robocalls and robotexts surged. Potential disinformation campaigns, scams and AI-generated deepfakes may hae been increasingly used to attempt to confuse and mislead the public, posing potential risks to voters and further eroding trust in the voice...
Settlement includes "historic" compliance plan, FCC says
The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau has come to a settlement with Lingo Telecom, the voice service provider that transmitted political robocalls to New Hampshire voters that included "deepfake", artificial intelligence-generated audio that impersonated President Joe Biden and...
Americans received more than 16 billion political calls in Q1 2024
Over the first three months of 2024, Americans received more than 16 billion political robocalls. The unwanted calls, which ranged from AI deepfake election disinformation campaigns to financially motivated scams and more traditional nuisance...
FCC, New Hampshire AG issue warning letters on AI-generated political calls
In the wake of the 2023 deadline for implementing the anti-robocall STIR/SHAKEN call authentication framework, more U.S. calls than ever are being authenticated as to their legitimacy—that is, whether they are actually coming from...
The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission said that a an ongoing joint effort to undermine and reduce spam and scam robocalls is bearing fruit.
The two agencies have been jointly focusing on robocall enforcement; the FTC calls its program "Operation Point...
Artificial intelligence is being explored to improve customer service with smarter chatbots, dispatch network technicians more efficiently and automate simple, highly manual network operations tasks. It's also being co-opted by bad actors to fuel smarter robocall and text scams, according to Transaction Network Services....
BICS' Head of Fraud Prevention and Security Katia Gonzalez provides an update on STIR/SHAKEN and argues that while the FCC's initiative has made a dent in the robocalls being experienced by many Americans, spam, fraud and other related telco issues must be considered on...
Avid Telecom is accused of making 7.5 billion illegal robocalls to millions of people on the Do Not Call Registry
Nearly every state in the U.S. — and D.C. — has joined a lawsuit this week against Avid Telecom, accusing the company of making 7.5 billion illegal robocalls to...
The STIR/SHAKEN call authentication framework is helping to reduce the overall volume of unwanted spam and scam robocalls, according to Transaction Network Services' newly released annual report on robocall trends.
Between STIR/SHAKEN being more widely implemented and regulatory enforcement actions in 2022, unwanted robocalls...
The Federal Communications Commission has warned two additional voice service providers not to carry illegal robocall traffic, the latest move in its ongoing efforts to crack down on unwanted spam and scam calls.
The agency said that it sent warning letters to SIPphony of...
Twenty twenty-two was a year of tangible improvement when it came to robocalls. There were two main factors responsible for this decrease. First, Tier-1 carriers continued to progress with their STIR/SHAKEN implementations, which allowed for more visibility into bad actors’ tactics. Second, with an...
The ten most dreaded words in the English language: "We are trying to reach you about your vehicle warranty." But the Federal Communications Commission says it has identified the people behind more than 8 billion of those auto warranty scam calls in the past...
Fraudulent robocalls are a menace across the globe. Many of these utilize call spoofing, a practice by which voice carriers and aggregators intentionally falsify caller ID information to gain an illicit advantage. Call spoofing enables many different types of fraud such as Wangiri (short...
The Federal Communications Commission continues its fight against robocalls, with several recent actions that include its largest-ever proposed fine against a Florida-based robocalling operation, a crackdown on service providers who have allegedly not lived up to their commitments to implementing the STIR/SHAKEN call authentication...
Mobile network operators and federal regulators continue to fight to reduce the number of spam and scam robocalls that flood Americans' phones each year. But the flip side of blocking unwanted calls is, how do you ensure that wanted phone calls from legitimate businesses...
Americans received 80 billion unwanted robocalls over the past 12 months. While it is difficult for consumers to wrap their heads around such a gaudy number, the reality is that following a brief dip during the COVID-19 lockdown, unwanted calls increased by 6% in...
There are two kinds of people in the world, says Grant Castle: Those who answer a call from an unknown number, and those who assume it's a spam call and let it go to voicemail.
Castle, who is VP of engineering services and quality...
Yesterday was a major deadline for implementation of anti-robocalling tools. As part of its ongoing efforts to combat scam and fraudulent robocalls, the Federal Communications Commission had established June 30 as the deadline for network operators to implement the STIR/SHAKEN framework to authenticate that...
Robocalls blowing up your phone? Twilio's VP of Communications Regulatory Affairs and Policy details how the TRACED Act and STIR/SHAKEN might finally put an end to that.
The Federal Communications Commission this week levied its largest-ever fine against a robocalling operation: $225 million, against two companies which the agency says transmitted around 1 billion robocalls shilling short-term health insurance.
The FCC said that many of the calls made in the first...
T-Mobile US has launched a new, free robocall blocking service for its users. "Scam Shield" makes use of the STIR/SHAKEN framework for call authentication to help users weigh whether or not to answer a given call. T-Mobile US will start the service on July...
As if the health risks of COVID-19 weren’t enough, robocall scammers are seizing on the chaos and confusion to fleece Americans out of their personal information and money. Nearly 5,000 coronavirus-related scams have been reported to the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network through...
SCOTUS upholds robocall ban, strikes down exception for government debt
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the 1991 law which bans robocalls to mobile phones, while striking down a 2015 exception which Congress passed to allow such robocalls for the collection of government debt.
"Americans passionately...
