Press Release  Major Telecom Companies Partner With Attorneys General to Implement New Principles to Combat Robocalls

Boston — Attorney General Maura Healey today announced her office has joined a multistate effort and partnered with several major telecommunication companies to implement principles aimed at combatting illegal and annoying robocalls.

The principles, announced today by a group attorneys general in partnership with AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon, and Windstream, will help service providers incorporate call-blocking technology, monitor their networks for robocall traffic, and cooperate with investigations that trace illegal robocalls.

“Robocalls are invasive, annoying, and harmful to the American people,” said AG Healey. “We’re pleased our multistate group brought telephone companies to the table to implement a new set of principles and technologies that will block many of these robocalls from reaching consumers.”         

AG Healey announced last year that her office had joined a multistate group formed to combat robocalls that plague American consumers and pursue solutions to this growing problem across the telecommunications industry. Since its formation, the group has worked with several major telecom companies to identify and implement technological capabilities to fight these calls. The principles announced today include:

• Offering free call blocking and labeling to customers.
• Implementing call authentication industry standards.
• Analyzing and monitoring network traffic for patterns consistent with robocalls.
• Investigating suspicious calls and calling patterns.
• Confirming the identity of commercial customers.
• Tracing illegal robocalls back to their source.
• Cooperating in traceback investigations, which track illegal robocalls across networks to determine the source.
• Communicating with state attorneys general to help identify scams and trends in illegal robocalling.

In March 2019, AG Healey joined a coalition of 54 attorneys general in urging the U.S. Senate to enact the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act, which would enable states, federal regulators, and telecom providers to take steps to combat illegal robocalls by participating in a call authentication framework to help block unwanted calls. In December 2018, AG Healey joined a bipartisan working group of attorneys general partnering to stop harmful robocalls by working with major telecommunications companies to implement new technology to combat illegal robocalls. In October 2018, AG Healey announced her office had joined a coalition of state attorneys general in calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and telephone service providers to implement new technologies and policies that would block more illegal robocalls.

The coalition of attorneys general, led by North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Indiana, includes attorneys general from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

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