OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter announced a working group of attorneys general and phone companies are collaborating to find solutions to robocalls.
According to Hunter’s office, the working group consists of attorneys general from all 50 states, Washington D.C. and 12 different service providers. The service providers include AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon and Windstream.
Working together, the companies agreed to adopt a set of eight principles to fight robocalls, which will “protect customers and make it easier for attorneys general to investigate and prosecute the criminals orchestrating the schemes.”
Phone companies will work to prevent illegal robocalls by:
- Implementing call-blocking technology at the network level at no cost to customers
- Making available to customers additional, free, easy-to-use call blocking and labeling tools
- Implementing technology to authenticate that callers are coming from a valid source
- Monitoring networks for robocall traffic
Phone companies will assist attorneys’ general anti-robocall enforcement by:
- Knowing who the customers are so scams can be identified and investigated
- Investigating and taking action against suspicious callers – including notifying law enforcement and state attorneys general
- Working with law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to trace the origins of illegal robocalls
- Requiring telephone companies with which they contract to cooperate in traceback identification
