Attorney General Alan Wilson pushes federal government to further crackdown on illegal robocalls

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – Attorney General Alan Wilson and 48 other attorneys general today called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to strengthen rules that would make it harder for scammers to make robocalls from legitimate telephone numbers by cutting off scammers’ access to those telephone numbers. The Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force asked the FCC to work on this issue in 2021, and members of this coalition are now responding to the FCC’s proposed rules.

“Robocalls aren’t just annoying, they’re often illegal,” Attorney General Wilson stated. “People are sick and tired of them, and I’m working with attorneys general from around the country to go after these scams that victimize South Carolinians.”

Last year, Americans received approximately 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts and lost nearly $2 billion to these scams. Scammers used to primarily illegally “spoof” other people’s phone numbers to make it look like a call was coming from a legitimate company or government agency. But scammers can’t easily do this anymore after the federal government and state attorneys general took action to cut down on illegal spoofing. Now, scammers often purchase legitimate phone numbers and use them to make robocalls.

While most legitimate businesses use the same phone number for many years, scammers cycle through millions of brand-new phone numbers, which helps them avoid detection by spam filters. In one North Carolina case, scammers made more than 17.3 million calls on a single day through one phone company – but they generally didn’t use the same number more than twice to make those calls, which is a common tactic among scammers.

Attorney General Wilson is joined in signing the letter by the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

You can read the letter here.