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The US might finally be doing something about robocalls
June 02, 2025
Withrobocallscontinuing to plague consumers on a daily basis, Republican Senator John Thune and Democrat Senator Ed Markey unveiled bipartisan legislation that looks to impose stiffer penalties and force U.S. carriers to use call authentication technologies.
According toReuters, the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act focuses on four changes:
Increasing the statute of limitations might be the most crucial, since such a change would give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) more time to properly conduct its investigations alongside federal agencies and state attorneys general. It would also give the FCC more time to prosecute violators and impose civil penalties.
“Existing civil penalty rules were designed to impose penalties on lawful telemarketers who make mistakes. This enforcement regime is totally inadequate for scam artists and we need to do more to separate enforcement of carelessness and other mistakes from more sinister actors,” said Senator Thune in a statement toReuters.
No date has yet been set on a vote.
If the request for call authentication technology sounds familiar, that is because FCC chairman Ajit Pai alluded to it in astrongly-worded lettersent to major U.S. telecom players earlier in November. In the letter, Pai called for an industry-wide solution for the deluge of robocalls and alluded to theSHAKEN/STIR framework.
In short, the SHAKEN/STIR framework acts as a handoff between the caller, carrier, and recipient of the call. The framework lets the carrier validate the phone call to make sure it comes from an authentic source. This addresses one of the biggest problems when it comes to robocalls, which is the spammers’ ability to spoof where the call is coming from.
According toNBC News, U.S. citizens received over 30 billion spam calls in 2017. That makes an average of 2.5 billion spam calls each month, with that number likely rising even further in 2018.
It is clear that robocalls are an ongoing and worsening problem, so it is good to see that Capitol Hill is finally taking it seriously.
NEXT:FCC ready to ‘take action’ against carriers if spam robocalls aren’t stopped
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