At an Economic Club event in Washington, DC today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interrupted on stage by a robocall, pausing an interview in front of dozens of people and driving home that absolutely no one is safe from the spam epidemic.
Over the past few months, regulators at the Federal Communications Commission have been feeling the pressure from lawmakers and consumers who are urging them to put an end to the relentless onslaught of robocalls people receive every day. Last year, consumers received over 26.3 billion of these scammy calls and the problem only appears to be getting worse.
“I’m getting a robocall, too,” Stephenson said during the Economic Club event, ultimately declining the call on his Apple Watch. “It’s literally a robocall.”
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson gets a robocall while onstage at @TheEconomicClub. pic.twitter.com/i5llHj6hz2 — CSPAN (@cspan) March 20, 2019
Lawmakers like Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and Ed Markey (D-MA) have introduced a bipartisan piece of legislation that would work to tone back the number of calls, but there hasn’t been any similar reaction from the FCC to combat the problem. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has repeatedly threatened some method of regulatory intervention if carriers like AT&T and Verizon don’t step up with a solution, but he and the commissioners have yet to propose any new rules for carriers.
In response to frustration from consumers, wireless providers including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have launched free spam filter for calls, but as Stephenson can now attest, it doesn’t make any difference. Today, AT&T and Comcast announced the “nation’s first” call authentication system between two service providers, so that’s a good step in the right direction.
Taronar on March 21st, 2019 at 01:35 UTC »
I get fake calls every week. Either for
1) my car insurance being expired
2) I'm going to get arrested
3) 华人并每日更新的新闻资讯网站，提供客观及时和准确的内容以及对新闻故事的深入分析和评论。我们也提
ijustwanttobejess on March 21st, 2019 at 00:55 UTC »
My largest client is a call center focused sales company. They also have an outbound sales department. Don't worry, their only leads are customers who have purchased a particular product that is about to run out or expire. They are extremely focused on both their internal DNC (do not call) list as well as the US federal DNC. All potential leads are scrubbed against both prior to being loaded.
Anyway, one of the things my company does for them is manage all telecom operations. I can, simply by making a change in their Avaya phone switch, set outbound calls to anything I want. I can even program it to, say, pick a random number that has the same country code, area code, and is only a few digits different then your own for every call. I don't, and I wouldn't, I would drop this client if they wanted to do that. But the problem is that I could.
Now, caller ID is different than full ANI data. This client pays at$t for full ANI on inbound calls. Which means when you call them, at$t gives them the actual originating number, regardless of any tricks you pull. At$t has that info, they just won't give it to you without paying for it.
If the major telecoms were forced by law to require caller ID to be set to a number actually owned by the originating party, much of this mess would go away. If the major telecoms were forced to provide full ANI to every customer, much of this mess would go away. Either way, they won't without legislation. They just don't care.
AdvancedAdvance on March 20th, 2019 at 21:09 UTC »
Sure hope he doesn't answer the phone, because most likely it's just some BS debt collection agency, reminding him that he still owes money to Ajit Pai.