A public and private coalition of 51 attorneys general, including Alaska’s Kevin Clarkson, and 12 telephone companies, have reached an agreement to fight illegal robocalls. They also want to make it easier for attorneys general to investigate and prosecute such activities.
It is important for phone companies to assist law enforcement in identifying the origin of illegal robocalls, and to assist consumers by blocking as many robocalls as possible, Clarkson said on Aug. 22, when announcing the agreement.
The phone companies agreed to implement call-blocking technology at the network level at no cost to consumers, and to make available to customers additional, free, easy to use call blocking and labeling tools. They also agreed to implement technology to authenticate that callers are coming from a valid source and to monitor their networks for robocall traffic, and to know which of their customers should be identified and investigated for illegal robocall activities, and to take action against suspicious callers.
The coalition includes attorneys general from all 50 states and Washington D.C.
Companies involved include AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon and Windstream.
