Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III Thursday announced that as a result of a bipartisan, public/private coalition of 51 attorneys general and 12 phone companies, the phone companies have agreed to adopt eight principles to fight illegal robocalls.

“Robocalls are uninvited, a breach of privacy, distracting and generally a menace,” said General Slatery. “This agreement should better protect Tennesseans from illegal robocalls and enable this Office and other attorneys general to investigate and prosecute offenders.”

The principles address the robocall problem in two main ways: prevention and enforcement and are available here https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/attorneygeneral/documents/pr/2019/pr19-32-principles.pdf.

Phone companies will work to prevent illegal robocalls by:

Implementing call-blocking technology at the network level at no cost to customers.
Making available to customers additional, free, easy-to-use call blocking and labeling tools.
Implementing technology to authenticate that callers are coming from a valid source.
Monitoring their networks for robocall traffic.

Phone companies will assist attorneys general anti-robocall enforcement by:

Knowing who their customers are so bad actors can be identified and investigated.
Investigating and taking action against suspicious callers – including notifying law enforcement and state attorneys general.
Working with law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to trace the origins of illegal robocalls.
Requiring telephone companies with which they contract to cooperate in traceback identification.

Going forward, phone companies will stay in close communication with the coalition of attorneys general to continue to optimize robocall protections as technology and scammer techniques change.

“The principles offer a comprehensive set of best practices that recognizes that no single action or technology is sufficient to curb the scourge of illegal and unwanted robocalls,” said Levi Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, Henning Schulzrinne. “I hope that all parts of the telecommunication industry, both large and small, will commit to rapidly implementing these principles and work with state and federal authorities to make people want to answer their phone again without fear of being defrauded or annoyed.”

The coalition of attorneys general, led by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald, and Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, includes attorneys general from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

The coalition of companies includes AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon, and Windstream.