The Federal Communications Commission has voted to make it illegal for robocallers abroad to trick U.S. consumers by disguising their phone numbers, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
According to the newspaper, the FCC voted on Thursday to extend a ban on faking caller information for malicious purposes to calls coming from overseas.
It noted scammers try to make it look like they are located near a consumer by faking or spoofing a phone number. Until Thursday, the ban on the practice applied to just calls originating in the U.S.
“You would have thought that this would already have been illegal,” said Jim Tyrrell, senior director of product marketing at TNS Inc. “They’re just making it harder and harder for the bad actors to find where the loopholes are.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the change would help the agency go after bad actors overseas, but maintained more work needs to be done.
"We're confident that the FCC, exercising the authority that we have, will be able to stop some of these problems we have before they materialize," Pai is quoted by CBS News.
The network news noted robocalls are the top complaint that comes to the FCC. According to CBS News robocalls came in at a rate of nearly 1,700 a second in June. About 1.8 billion of them came from scammers.
The FCC has told phone companies they need to come up with new technology by the end of the year to determine if a call is legitimate.
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