Everybody, except the people making money from them, hates robocalls, but new rules being adopted by the FCC will better protect all Americans against such malicious calls.
As InputMag reports, the FCC has this week voted in favor of adopting the STIR/SHAKEN suite of protocols across the entire industry. The protocols are designed to stop caller ID spoofing, which robocallers use to mask their identity by displaying a local number on your phone rather than the real one which can be located anywhere in the world.
AT&T and T-Mobile decided to implement STIR/SHAKEN last year, but the FCC ruling makes it mandatory for all phone companies who now have to implement it by June 2021. Once in place, it will be possible to check to ensure each call matches a caller's number and therefore hasn't been spoofed. If it doesn't match, a phone company can choose not to allow it to reach a customer. This won't stop illegal robocalls being made, but it could drastically reduce the number of calls reaching our phones.
In a news release, the FCC said, "The FCC estimates that the benefits of eliminating the wasted time and nuisance caused by illegal scam robocalls will exceed $3 billion annually, and STIR/SHAKEN is an important part of realizing those cost savings. Additionally, when paired with call analytics, STIR/SHAKEN will help protect American consumers from fraudulent robocall schemes that cost Americans approximately $10 billion annually."
While the call authentication systems need to be in place by 2021, there's no provision forcing different phone companies to have compatible authentication systems. So it could be the case that an illegal robocall makes it from one network to another and ultimately makes your phone ring, but there should be far fewer of them. Hopefully we will eventually see one authentication system working across the entire phone network covering all carriers.
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