The Battle against Robocallers Gets Teeth – Round 4

By Alan Percy, Senior Director of Product Marketing, TelcoBridges

The battle to stop illegal robocalling is about to get teeth with introduction this week of the TRACED Act, introduced as a bill to the US Senate by Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass)

Introduced as S.3655, the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act, which includes:

  • Requires the implementation of means to verify the accuracy of caller identification information by voice providers (both legacy and VoIP service providers)
  • Improves enforcement of violators with increased fines of up to $10,000 per call and extends the statute of limitations to three years
  • Aligns various federal law enforcement agencies to prosecute illegal robocallers and report to Congress on the effectiveness of their prosecution efforts.

“The TRACED Act targets robocall scams and other intentional violations of telemarketing laws so that when authorities do catch violators, they can be held accountable,” said Thune. “Existing civil penalty rules were designed to impose penalties on lawful telemarketers who make mistakes. This enforcement regime is totally inadequate for scam artists and we need do more to separate enforcement of carelessness and other mistakes from more sinister actors.”

“As the scourge of spoofed calls and robocalls reaches epidemic levels, the bipartisan TRACED Act will provide every person with a phone much needed relief,” said Markey. “It’s a simple formula: call authentication, blocking, and enforcement, and this bill achieves all three. I thank Chairman Thune for his partnership on this effort, and look forward to seeing this legislation through to its passage.”

A key element of the TRACED Act is implementation of caller identification verification, accomplished via the SHAKEN framework, giving operators a means to identify and trace the origin of illegal robocalls.  As Eric Berger, FCC CTO explains in a podcast interview, “with this technology we will actually know where these calls are coming from…and will able to find the originating offender”

As an innovative network equipment and software company, TelcoBridges has been closely following the development of the STIR/SHAKEN framework, preparing both our FreeSBC session border controller and Tmedia media gateways to be part of the framework implementation.

To learn more about the STIR/SHAKEN framework and how to implement it in a service provider network:

TelcoBridges products help meet the requirements of the TRACED Act, find out how by contacting sales@telcobridges.com