Robocalls are rampant despite the Do Not Call list — FCC urges phone providers to help stop them

February 26, 2019

The Federal Communications Commission, as part of a crackdown on the billions of unsolicited robocalls every year, is warning phone providers to implement technology to stop the scammers or face new government rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday

“Recently I told the industry, ‘Look, we need to adopt call authentication, essentially a digital fingerprint, for every single phone call this year. We need to have it now or otherwise it’s going to be regulatory intervention,’” Pai told CNBC’s Jon Fortt, in a“Squawk Box” interview from the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain.

Hiya, a startup aiming to reduce telemarketing calls, estimates that Americans got 26.3 billion robocalls last year, a 46 percent increase from 2017. The average U.S. consumer received 10 spam calls per month last year, Hiya’s Robocall Radar report shows…