Attorneys general, phone companies team up to fight illegal robocalls

Fifty-one attorneys general -- including Josh Stein here in North Carolina -- are teaming up with 12 phone companies to fight illegal robocalls.

They're using eight principles to tackle the problem through prevention and enforcement.

Phone companies will work to prevent illegal robocalls by:

• Implementing call-blocking technology at the network level at no cost to customers.
• Making available to customers additional, free, easy-to-use call blocking and labeling tools.
• Implementing technology to authenticate that callers are coming from a valid source.
• Monitoring their networks for robocall traffic.

Phone companies will assist attorneys general anti-robocall enforcement by:

• Knowing who their customers are so bad actors can be identified and investigated.
• Investigating and taking action against suspicious callers - including notifying law enforcement and state attorneys general.
• Working with law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to trace the origins of illegal robocalls.
• Requiring telephone companies with which they contract to cooperate in traceback identification.

The coalition of attorneys general, led by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald, and Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, includes attorneys general from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The coalition of companies includes AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon, and Winstream.