FCC proposal would help fight one-ring call scams

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“One-ring scams are annoying and pernicious, waking up many Americans with confusing calls in the middle of the night and tricking them out of their money if they call back,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. “With this effort, this agency shows it’s serious about aggressively combating this scam.”

Earlier this month, the FCC and FTC sent letters to three gateway providers that were facilitating COVID-19-related robocall scams. The FCC warned that if the providers did not cut off those robocalls, phone companies would begin blocking all traffic from those gateway providers’ networks. According to the FCC, the providers stopped carrying those scams within 24 hours. Now, the FCC wants feedback on whether a similar approach might be used for one-ring scam calls.

In the meantime, the FCC advises consumers not to answer or return calls from numbers they don’t recognize and to check whether unfamiliar numbers have international area codes. It even suggests asking your phone company to block outgoing international calls if you don’t typically place those.

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