Heather Curtis
WMAL.com.
WASHINGTON — (WMAL) They promise to lower your credit card interest rates, or offer the ominous warning that there’s a warrant out for your arrest, and all of these robocalls have one thing in common – they’re made by scammers looking to rip you off.
Maryland’s Attorney General Brian Frosh and his counterparts in 28 other states are trying to stop the scammers. They’ve written to the FCC urging the agency to pass new rules to crack down on those obnoxious robocalls.
Regulatory roadblocks prevent many phone companies from sparing their customers from them.
In the past it was easier to ignore these calls because they came mostly from 800 numbers. Now better technology is making them harder to detect because the calls come up with local area codes, likely ones you call frequently or the one associated with your own phone number. These are known as spoofed calls. The FCC has proposed rules that would allow cell phone companies to block calls from invalid or unallocated numbers, and numbers whose owners have requested to be blocked.
“While robocalls will never completely disappear – having the FCC take action can prevent potential harm to millions of consumers. Consumers should always be wary of answering calls from numbers they do not recognize and should never give out personal information,” Frosh said in a press release.
The letter supporting the proposed regulations was not signed by the attorneys general of Maryland or D.C. but was signed by Frosh and his counterparts in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
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