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FCC fight against robocalls goes international:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced on Thursday that it has signed an agreement with its Australian counterpart to work together to fight robocalls.
The signing of the "Memorandum of Understanding" with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is the latest in a number of moves the FCC has made to combat robocalls in recent months.
The agreement seeks for the two agencies to "work together to develop and coordinate a global approach to addressing unlawful robocalls or robotexts, and the unlawful use of inaccurate caller ID information or 'spoofing,' the FCC said.
"Robocall scams are a global problem that require global commitment and cooperation," Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. "With these irritating calls coming from near and far, we need international cooperation, information sharing, and enforcement to address this matter. I want to thank our Australian friends for working with us on this agreement. By joining together we can help get these scammers off of our networks and protect consumers and businesses around the world."
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday June 05 2021, @05:30PM (1 child)
We started getting them after a data breach at our telecoms provider (TalkTalk) some years back. A good mix of actual-person calls and a few robocalls. Early ones often pretended to be TalkTalk, but later ones have been robocalls warning us that our subscription to service X is about to be cancelled. The number of calls has dwindled over the years since that breach.
My favoured reaction (especially with real-person phishing calls) is to chat conversationally with them in a language other than English, until they decide to hang up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Saturday June 05 2021, @05:42PM
P.S. This was all complicated by the fact that our service *did* get cut off because a gentleman living nearby mis-typed their telephone number as ours when they decided to switch providers. We kept getting "sorry you're leaving" transfer letters from our provider, which we cancelled each time, but the other person kept re-requesting the transfer each time "someone" cancelled it for him. Our provider was never told who was making the requests, so couldn't rectify the error at the other end.
Our service eventually did get cut off when the goodbye letter arrived while we were on holiday, and didn't cancel it in time. Chasing that involved our provider telling us whhich provider they'd transferred the service to, and us explaining to them that they'd transferred a number that belonged to someone else. Apparently they had a bit of a job explaining to the gentleman that "no, we weren't stopping them from transferring their number" , but stopping them from transferring ours. Oh, what fun!