Everyone Likes to Complain About Robocalls

Are they willing to do anything about it?

By Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

Every time I’m in a social setting and I get asked about what I do for a career, the subject of illegal robocalls always dominates the discussion.   “What are you doing to stop them?”

I clearly remember a series of meetings with service providers a few years back, pitching them on solutions to the illegal robocall problem that could be solved with session border controller software.   They could not care less about the problem.   As much as consumers complained to the FCC about the problem, there was little that service providers could or would do about the problem.  They were getting paid to transit the calls and had little motivation to fix the problem.  It was someone else’s problem.

All that changed with the TRACED Act of 2019.

The TRACED act included a number of new tools and mandates:

Caller ID Authentication requiring the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN – this forced originating service providers to attach an Identity Token to the header of the call, with origination traceback information and an Attestation field that indicated whether the call could be trusted.

Call Blocking – prior to the TRACED act, service providers had to pass all traffic, essentially preventing them from screening call and preventing illegal robocalls from being delivered to consumers.  The Act allowed service providers to block suspicious traffic and indemnified them from prosecution for failing to delivering what they felt was a suspicious call.

Scam Call Protection – required the FCC to explore means to prevent One Ring Scams and protect hospitals from illegal calls.

Enforcement – the Act increased penalties, extended statute of limitations and other tools to help find and charge those generating and passing known illegal robocalls.

The first big milestone of the TRACED Act is almost upon us.  Service providers in the US are required to file their Robocall Mitigation Plans with the FCC by June 30th 2021.   The penalty for not filing a plan is having their traffic blocked by other providers after September 28th, 2021.

So all of a sudden, service providers are interested in dealing with illegal robocalls.

We discussed this in more details during a Cloud Communications Alliance webinar titled “Robocall Mitigation Compliance”, explaining the details of filing and impact of not filing a plan.

View the recording here: