Are you sick of unwanted calls from strangers trying to dig into your personal business about your car’s extended warranty? If so, the FCC may have good news for you.
New rules seeking to limit the proliferation of robocalls went into effect on Thursday under a new framework of interconnected measures dubbed STIR/SHAKEN.
STIR/SHAKEN stands for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs (SHAKEN), and essentially it is a series of checkpoints along the way that a call must pass through that validates the number you see on your caller ID is actually the number tied to the call and not just a number that’s being “spoofed.”
Spoofing a number is already an illegal act, and it’s a trick scammers use to get people to answer their phones by obscuring who may actually be calling.
Related
There were 4.4 billion calls made in the U.S. in April alone. The FCC’s new authentication framework is looking to drop that number considerably.
So, what happens if you still get an unwanted inquiry into your car's warranty status or a credit card you don't actually have? If you receive a robocall trying to sell you something (and you haven’t given the caller your written permission), it is illegal. First, hang up. Then, file a complaint with the FTC here and then the National Do Not Call Registry.
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