Legitimate phone calls are getting blocked in crackdown on robocalls

August 29, 2019

Your cellphone rings from a number you don’t recognize. Reluctantly, you pick it up and discover it’s an automated call from your credit card company, warning you that someone has fraudulently used your card to buy 10 plane tickets to Singapore. You won’t have to pay the charges. Whew!

Amid state and federal efforts to crack down on scam robocalls, legitimate robocallers worry that calls like this one will be blocked too.

Last week, attorneys general from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia announced a new agreement with telecom companies to crack down on illegal calls and scams. The U.S. House and Senate both have approved measures to curb the scam calls and are currently ironing out the differences between them, and the Federal Communications Commission is working on its own anti-scammer rules...