Overview
- A bipartisan group of roughly 49 state attorneys general filed a comment letter to the FCC on Wednesday pressing the agency to expand its proposed robocall rules and cut off scammers’ access to legitimately assigned phone numbers.
- The letter asks the FCC to require stronger certification for companies that buy and resell numbers, mandate regular reports about number sales and assignments, require applicants to attest they will not use numbers for illegal robocalls, block sales to entities not tied to calling services, and ban number cycling and widespread trial-number use.
- The attorneys general say scammers have shifted from spoofing to buying and rotating millions of real numbers to evade filters, and they point to large recent metrics to press urgency, including about 29.6 billion robocalls and texts and nearly $2 billion in losses nationwide last year and roughly 513.8 million calls to Missourians since January 2026.
- The multistate Anti‑Robocall Litigation Task Force says enhanced reporting and traceability through the reseller chain would let law enforcement identify and hold high-volume carriers and resellers accountable for numbers used in fraud.
- If the FCC adopts the stronger measures the coalition requests, the changes could reduce the supply of numbers available to scammers and speed investigations, but the group warns the agency’s current proposal does not yet fully address the shift to bulk purchases and rapid number cycling.