Hoping to fight a
growing plague of robocalls, a dozen phone companies including the country’s
biggest mobile and broadband providers agreed on Thursday to adopt new
call-blocking technology and other measures to help regulators track down
swindlers.
As part of a pact
with 51 attorneys general from across the country, the companies said they
would install technology intended to stamp out the calls before they reached
consumers, who have long railed about the flood of robocalls that reached 4.7
billion in July, according to YouMail, a call-blocking service.
“Robocalls are a
scourge — at best, annoying, at worst, scamming people out of their hard-earned
money,” said Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general, a co-leader of the
coalition with the attorneys general from New Hampshire and Indiana. “By
signing on to these principles, industry leaders are taking new steps to keep
your phone from ringing with an unwanted call.”
The new agreement —
which covers Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Comcast and other providers —
builds on work many are already doing to roll out technical standards that
would help ensure that callers are using legitimate phone numbers. Currently,
scammers often display bogus numbers — sometimes spoofing local or official
numbers, like the Social Security Administration —
to tempt targets into picking up the call.
Margot Saunders,
senior counsel to the National Consumer Law Center, called the agreement “a
good effort.” She said it showed that phone companies had an interest in
establishing a system to know who their customers really were, while also
requiring companies to establish a system to trace calls.
“These two principles
address issues nobody else has,” she added.
The agreement does
not provide a deadline for the companies to complete the integration of
call-verifying technology, but it does cover the full range of service
providers, from cable landlines to mobile communications to Voice over Internet
Protocol companies. For the services to work best, it’s crucial that both ends
of a call be verified, and that requires different kinds of providers to take
part.
T-Mobile was the
first to install the new standard — known by the acronym Stir/Shaken, a
reference to James Bond and martini preparation — in January, although it is
compatible only with certain devices. Verizon has also started rolling out call
authentication, while T-Mobile and AT&T are working together to
validate calls across their networks. AT&T has also begun validating calls with
Comcast.
The other providers
that signed the agreement are Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter Communications,
Consolidated Communications, Frontier Communications, U.S. Cellular and
Windstream Services.
Despite the lack of
hard deadlines, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stein said his hope was that the
companies would apply the new technology, as well as more free call-blocking
and labeling tools, “as soon as is practical.”
The carriers will
also be tasked with analyzing and monitoring network traffic to try to identify
and monitor patterns consistent with robocalls — and then investigate
suspicious activity, which will help attorneys general identify and prosecute
illegal robocallers.
Jim McEachern,
principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry
Solutions, an association that focuses on industrywide problems, said that the
participants who have signed on provide the critical mass needed to help make
caller authentication effective. “The players here cover all segments of the
industry,” he added, “so that is very positive in my mind.”
Anti-spoofing
technology will not end spam calls, experts have said, but it should help curb
the volume of calls. Smaller players who do not move quickly to adopt the
caller authentication standard could still be exploited by robocallers, but the
technology will make it easier to identify the source of the spam. That could
allow regulators a route to tracking down offenders.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22,
2019, Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the
headline: Deal Is Reached to Thwart Robocaller Plague.
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