All 50 State AGs Launch Effort to Ban Foreign Robocalls

In a statement published last week, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced that he was forming a nationwide Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force to fight robocalls. Joined by the attorneys general of Indiana and Ohio, the task force invites those from all 50 states to “investigate and take legal action” against gateway providers responsible for allowing foreign robocalls to swamp users. As of writing, the task force has already issued 20 civil investigative demands to as many gateway providers, which it says are the source of a majority of foreign robocall traffic.

Providers are required to ensure the calls being placed through their services are lawful. Many times, foreign robocalls are anything but. They gain hold of consumers’ finances by manipulating consumers into agreeing to confusing “contracts” or providing account credentials. Sometimes these calls even prey on consumers’ emotional vulnerabilities by pretending a loved one is in jail or in the hospital and requires funds for bail or emergency surgery. According to the National Consumer Law Center and Electronic Privacy Information Center, robocalls—most of which come from overseas—manage to extract about $29.8 billion dollars from US consumers per year. Stein and other AGs suspect gateway providers are intentionally looking the other way; a call ignored is a profit made.

“Foreign scammers aren’t just annoying—they steal billions of dollars from consumers each year and these gateway providers may be illegally helping them to do it,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said in his own statement regarding the task force.

Officials have increasingly needed to step in to prevent Americans from facing further financial losses as a result of incessant robocalls. Stein himself helped to shut down a fake charity robocall operation last year after finding that the scam—which promised support for veterans, children, and firefighters—had taken more than $110 million from consumers. In March Congress passed the Do Not Call Act, which amended the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1993 to impose harsher penalties on those using robocalls or other phone scam tactics to steal from consumers. Perhaps most notably, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently issued an order requiring gateway providers to implement specific caller ID standards in the IP portions of their networks. Although these standards don’t appear to block robocalls from coming in, they do help consumers determine whether a call is legitimate before they pick up the phone.