Robocalls are super annoying, distracting you from what you're doing at best and scamming you out of your personal info at worst. Several U.S. carriers and state attorneys general are teaming up to do something about it.
Twelve U.S. carriers and 51 state attorneys general have entered into a partnership to fight robocalls for consumers. The coalition includes AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon as well as Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, U.S. Cellular, and Windstream.
As part of this pact, the U.S. carriers will deploy robocall blocking technology known as SHAKEN and STIR at the network level and offer it at no cost to customers. The carriers have also pledged to offer free, easy-to-use call blocking tools and monitor their networks for robocall traffic.
The agreement will also see carriers working with state AGs and law enforcement to investigate suspicious callers, notify law enforcement about these malicious parties, and work with both law enforcement and the state AGs to trace the origins of illegal robocalls.
Robocalls affect nearly cellphone owner nowadays, and they can be especially annoying when they use a tactic called spoofing, which is when they use a phone number that's similar to yours to make their call appear legitimate. This partnership between the carriers and state AGs is unlikely to end robocalls completely, but if it can at least reduce the number that everyone gets on a daily basis, then that'd be great.