Last week, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch and a bipartisan coalition of 51 state Attorneys General filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in support of efforts to mandate network-level blocking of illegal robotexts.
“Illegal robotexts present all the same problems as illegal robocalls, as intrusions into your privacy and vehicles for fraud and identity theft,” said Fitch. “But they also pose additional dangers, including links that can give scammers direct access to personal data on your phone. We must take a strong and concerted stand to stop illegal texts before they reach consumers and put them at risk.”
The FCC estimates that in 2020, scammers stole more than $86 million through spam texting fraud, with the average consumer losing $800. In response, the FCC is proposing to require mobile wireless providers block illegal text messages at the network level when the texts come from invalid, unallocated, or unused numbers, or from numbers that are on a Do-Not-Originate list. These efforts mirror efforts already taken to curtail illegal robocalls.
In their public comments supporting these efforts, the Attorneys General note that they had previously “supported a similar blocking requirement in the context of voice calls. This was the first of many call-blocking measures instituted by the Commission, and it is our hope that the Commission will consider adapting and integrating other similarly successful blocking and mitigation mandates for players in the robotext ecosystem in the near future.”
